C. Presutti et al., IDENTIFICATION OF THE CIS-ELEMENTS MEDIATING THE AUTOGENOUS CONTROL OF RIBOSOMAL-PROTEIN L2 MESSENGER-RNA STABILITY IN YEAST, EMBO journal, 14(16), 1995, pp. 4022-4030
The ribosomal protein L2 (rpL2) of Saccharomyces cerevisiae regulates
the accumulation of its own mRNA by a feedback mechanism. An RNA seque
nce is responsible for this control, initially characterized as a 360
nucleotide-long region, localized at the 5' end of the transcript, Thi
s region, fused to an unrelated coding sequence, is able to down-regul
ate the accumulation of the chimeric transcript when increased levels
of rpL2 are induced in the cell, The target regulatory region also res
ponds to regulation when inserted inside an intron, demonstrating that
the control process can take place inside the nucleus, Deletion analy
sis from the 5' and 3' borders have restricted the responsive region t
o approximately 200 nt, The insertion of a poly-G cassette downstream
of the regulatory region allowed the identification of truncated 3' cu
t-off poly(A)(+) RNA molecules, The parallel identification of cut-off
molecules containing the 5' portion of the transcript allowed us to d
educe that the truncated products originate by endonucleolytic cleavag
e, Altogether, these results are consistent with a mechanism by which
the presence of excess amounts of rpL2 in the cell triggers its own mR
NA to a degradative pathway; this involves an initial endonucleolytic
cleavage that is followed by exonucleolytic trimming, Such a regulator
y mechanism shows interesting analogies with the translational regulat
ion of r-proteins in Escherichia coli.