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Curr Genet (2016) 62:687690
DOI 10.1007/s00294-016-0587-1
REVIEW
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3619-632X
Web End = Received: 24 February 2016 / Revised: 26 February 2016 / Accepted: 27 February 2016 / Published online: 14 March 2016 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
could freely diffuse in the bacterial cytosol, unless they were bound to the membrane or the chromosome. However, this view has been severely challenged in the last decades, especially with the advent of high-resolution light-microscopy and various uorescent proteins fusions, which have revealed that many cytosolic proteins are actually localized to specic regions of the cell.
However, it is not only proteins that are localized, but also their substrates, and an intriguing example of this are the mRNAs. These molecules are transcribed at their gene of origin, i.e., at a discrete location inside the cell, and are thereafter bound and translated by ribosomes until they are degraded with typical half-lives of 110 min. However, several of the key ribonucleases that perform the mRNA decay are associated with the inside of the membrane, and as a consequence, the localization of each mRNA molecule determines whether it can be degraded.
Surprisingly for such a central function as mRNA decay, the machinery is not conserved, or even similar, in all bacteria (Laalami et al. 2014). Instead, each genus or family appears to have adopted its own specic combination from the pool of bacterial ribonucleases, both for RNA degradation, but also for maturation of essential RNA molecules such as ribosomal RNA and tRNA (Ow and Kushner 2002; Britton et al. 2007; Linder et al. 2014). Nevertheless, membrane association appears to be a recurring theme, since RNase E and RNase Y, both of which are endoribonucleases that serve as assembly-points for other enzymes that participate in RNA decay, are membrane bound (Hunt et al. 2006; Khemici et al. 2008; Lehnik-Habrink et al. 2011; Roux et al. 2011; Murashko et al. 2012; Mackie 2013). RNase E can be found in many model organisms, chief of which is Escherichia coli, where a wealth of information about this enzyme has been accumulated over the years. In contrast, the recently discovered and evolutionary unrelated
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Web End = How does subcellular localization affect the fate of bacterial mRNA?
Peter Redder1http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3619-632X
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