Figure 3.

Screenshot of the secondary structure representation for the RsmY RNA family (RF00195) with the annotation for the CsrA binding motif (RM00005) overlaid. Positions in red indicate that all the seed sequences at that position are found to contain the motif while other colours represent fewer sequences having matches at that position. The CsrA protein is a homo-dimeric, RNA binding protein. Each CsrA binds a specific RNA motif that is characterized by a short hairpin that hosts a GGA subsequence, these motifs generally occur in pairs. The CsrA-binding sRNAs, like RsmY, generally sequester excess copies of CsrA which would otherwise bind mRNAs and inhibit translation (23). Therefore, the expression of these sRNAs is a rapid way of altering expression levels for a potentially large network of proteins (24).