Figure 3.

The excludon concept. Schematic representation of putative gene organisations that produce overlapping transcripts in bacteria. (a) Long 5′ UTR overlapping. (b) Long 3′ UTR overlapping among convergent genes that lack a transcriptional terminator between them. (c) Long 3′ UTR overlapping generated by transcriptional termination read‐through events. If a transcriptional terminator exists between two convergent genes, the RNA polymerase occasionally reads through the terminator signal generating long overlapping 3′ UTRs. (d) Noncontiguous operons that contain an interspersed gene that is transcribed in the opposite direction, generating two overlapping mRNAs that are reciprocally regulated. Chart drawing references are included. Different putative mRNA transcripts are represented as dashed arrows. (+) and (−) indicates DNA strands, respectively. P_fw and P_rv represent promoters encoded at the forward and reverse DNA strands, respectively