Hierarchical Post-transcriptional Regulation of Colicin E2 Expression in Escherichia coli
Fig 3
Approximate stationary solutions for (A) long mRNA, (B) CsrA dimers and (C) sRNA.
The stationary solutions are given as a function of the effective transcription rate αM of long mRNA and the production rate αS of sRNA.
The production rate of CsrA dimers was set to αA = 58.52. All other system parameters are given in S1 Table. For values of αM and αS below the threshold, the abundances of free long mRNA and sRNA are zero, as any newly produced component quickly forms a complex with the highly abundant CsrA. At sufficiently large production or transcription rates, sRNA and long mRNA titrate all available CsrA molecules and can thus attain non-zero molecule numbers, The white line gives the transition between two approximate analytical solutions (Materials and Methods).