Post-transcriptional control of mRNA transcript processing by RNA binding proteins (RBPs) is an important step in the regulation of gene expression and protein production. The post-transcriptional regulatory network is similar in complexity to the transcriptional regulatory network and is thought to be organized in RNA regulons, coherent sets of functionally related mRNAs combinatorially regula...

Oestrogen-mediated gene expression is regulated at both the transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels. The molecular mechanism of transcriptional regulation has been well characterized. On the other hand, there is little understanding of the mechanism of post-transcriptional regulation. To clarify the mechanism of oestrogen-mediated post-transcriptional regulation, we focused on A+U-rich-...

Post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression plays a crucial role in many bacterial pathways. In particular, the translation of mRNA can be regulated by trans-acting, small, non-coding RNAs (sRNAs) or mRNA-binding proteins, each of which has been successfully treated theoretically using two-component models. An important system that includes a combination of these modes of post-transcript...

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) model some of the mechanisms that regulate gene expression. Among the computational approaches available to model and study GNRs, Boolean network (BN) emerged as very successful to better understand both the structural and dynamical properties of GRNs. Nevertheless, the most widely used models based on BNs do not include any post-transcriptional regulation mechan...

Gene expression of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is a highly regulated process. Basal transcription of the integrated provirus generates early transcripts that encode for the viral products Tat and Rev. Tat promotes the elongation of RNA polymerase while Rev mediates the nuclear export of viral RNAs that contain the Rev-responsive RNA element (RRE). These RNAs are exported fro...

RNAs in cells are associated with RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) to form ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complexes. The RBPs influence the structure and interactions of the RNAs and play critical roles in their biogenesis, stability, function, transport and cellular localization. Eukaryotic cells encode a large number of RBPs (thousands in vertebrates), each of which has unique RNA-binding activity and pr...

Biofilms are characterized by a dense multicellular community of microorganisms that can be formed by the attachment of bacteria to an inert surface and to each other. The development of biofilm involves the initial attachment of planktonic bacteria to a surface, followed by replication, cell-to-cell adhesion to form microcolonies, maturation, and detachment. Mature biofilms are embedded in a s...

Medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumor in children, is a disease whose mechanisms are now beginning to be uncovered by high-throughput studies of somatic mutations, mRNA expression patterns, and epigenetic profiles of patient tumors. One emerging theme from studies that sequenced the tumor genomes of large cohorts of medulloblastoma patients is frequent mutation of RNA binding p...

Each cell of an organism contains an identical copy of the whole genome. However, different tissues have different functions, which means that each cell utilizes only a subset of its genes. The process in which the cell controls the activation of a subset of genes is called gene regulation. Gene regulation can occur at different time points along the gene expression process, including chromatin...