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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Apr 12.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Rev Genet. 2010 Nov 23;12(1):32–42. doi: 10.1038/nrg2899

Figure 3. Effects of mRNA secondary structure on translation initiation in Bacteria.

Figure 3

A) Structure in the ribosome binding site (RBS) usually inhibits initiation. However, initiation can occur when the structured element is positioned between the Shine-Dalgarno sequence (SD) and start codon (AUG)129, or 15 nucleotides downstream of the start codon130, 131. B) Synonymous mutations in the region from nt −4 to +37 of a GFP gene alter predicting folding energies by up to 12 kcal/mol. 5′ mRNA folding energies below −10 kcal/mol strongly inhibits GFP expression in E. coli55. C) More than 40% of human genes have predicted 5′ folding energies below the −10 kcal/mol threshold, and are therefore expected to express poorly in E. coli without modification.