Before It Gets Started Regulating Translation at the 5′ UTR.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Comparative and Functional Genomics Volume 2012, Article ID 475731, 8 pages doi:10.1155/2012/475731 Review Article Before It Gets Started: Regulating Translation at the 5 UTR Patricia R. Araujo,1 Kihoon Yoon,1, 2 Daijin Ko,3 Andrew D. Smith,4 Mei Qiao,1 Uthra Suresh,1 Suzanne C. Burns,1 and Luiz O. F. Penalva1, 5 1 Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute, UTHSCSA, San Antonio, TX 78229-3900, USA 2 Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, UTHSCSA, San Antonio, TX 78229-3900, USA 3 Department of Management Science and Statistics, UTSA, San Antonio, TX 78249-0631, USA 4 Molecular and Computational Biology, Department of Biological Sciences, USC, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2910, USA 5 Department of Cellular and Structural Biology, UTHSCSA, San Antonio, TX 78229-3900, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Luiz O. F. Penalva, penalva@ Received 2 January 2012; Revised 22 February 2012; Accepted 11 March 2012 Academic Editor: Thomas Preiss Copyright © 2012 Patricia R. Araujo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Translation regulation plays important roles in both normal physiological conditions and diseases states. This regulation requires cis-regulatory elements located mostly in 5 and 3 UTRs and trans-regulatory factors (e.g., RNA binding proteins (RBPs)) which recognize specific RNA features and interact with the translation machinery to modulate its activity. In this paper, we discuss important aspects of 5 UTR-mediated regulation by providing an overview of the characteristics and the function of the main elements present in t