Riboregulators

After observing the many and varied naturally occuring post-transcriptional, regulatory RNA systems, Isaacs et al. designed and engineered a modular synthetic system where RNA turns on and off gene expression by controlling translation. The modularity of their system allows any gene to be regulated instead of only a specific gene to which the riboregulator is targeted. The design itself has two components: a short cis-RNA sequence (crRNA) that is inserted upstream of the gene and a trans-RNA sequence (taRNA) that targets the crRNA.