The Lacto-usp RNA motif is a conserved RNA structure identified in bacteria by bioinformatics.[1] Lacto-usp RNAs are found exclusively in lactic acid bacteria, and exclusively in the possible 5′ untranslated regions of (5′ UTRs) operons that contain a hypothetical gene and a usp gene. The usp gene encodes the universal stress protein. It was proposed that the Lacto-usp might correspond to the 6S RNA of the relevant species, because four of five of these species lack a predicted 6S RNA, and 6S RNAs commonly occur in 5′ UTRs of usp genes. However, given that the Lacto-usp RNA motif is much shorter than the standard 6S RNA structure, the function of Lacto-usp RNAs remains unclear.

Lacto-usp RNA
Consensus secondary structure of Lacto-usp RNAs
Identifiers
SymbolLacto-usp RNA
RfamRF01710
Other data
RNA typesRNA
Domain(s)Lactic acid bacteria
PDB structuresPDBe

References

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  1. ^ Weinberg Z, Wang JX, Bogue J, et al. (March 2010). "Comparative genomics reveals 104 candidate structured RNAs from bacteria, archaea and their metagenomes". Genome Biol. 11 (3): R31. doi:10.1186/gb-2010-11-3-r31. PMC 2864571. PMID 20230605.
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