Modularity of Ribosomal Binding Sites

Ribosomal Binding Site (RBS) part is the principle component in the translation process. It has been widely known that RBS parts are non-modular in nature and show variations in expression levels for different proteins. It has been argued that such variations are a combined result of thermal stability of mRNA molecules near RBS and codon bias.

In regard to translation process, fundamental machinery in Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes are quite different. Transcription and translation processes are coupled in prokaryotes dissimilar to eukaryotes. This seems to be the probable cause of non-modular nature of RBS parts when they are used with different promoters to express the same protein, as we show at the end of this section.

In this section, we aim to provide a qualitative and quantitative information about the non-modular nature of RBS parts with respect to protein coding and promoter parts. We have used publicaly available expression data to validate an elementary model to predict the protein expression levels.

Note: Apart from various researchers, previous year iGEM teams (2010 & 2011 Team Warsaw) have experimentally shown the non-modular nature of RBS parts.

Section 2

Content 2