Stealth regulation: biological circuits with small RNA switches

So you think you finally understand the regulation of your favorite gene? The transcriptional regulators have been identified; the signaling cascades that regulate synthesis and activity of the regulators have been found. Possibly you have found that the regulator is itself unstable, and that instability is necessary for proper regulation. Time to look for a new project, or retire and rest on your laurels? Not so fast—there's more. It is rapidly becoming apparent that another whole level of regulation lurks, unsuspected, in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, hidden from our notice in part by the transcription-based approaches that we usually use to study gene regulation, and in part because these regulators are very small targets for mutagenesis and are not easily found from genome sequences alone. These stealth regulators, operating below our radar, if not that of the cell, are small regulatory RNAs, acting to control the translation and degradation of many messengers. These RNAs can be potent and multifunctional, allowing new signaling pathways to cross-regulate targets independently of the transcriptional signals for those targets, introducing polarity within operons, and explaining some puzzles in well-studied regulatory circuits.

The importance of small regulatory RNAs was first appreciated in the elegant studies of plasmid-encoded antisense RNAs. The few apparently unusual cases of noncoding regulatory RNAs encoded in the bacterial chromosome has expanded over the last decade, and the role such RNA regulators play in both stimulating and inhibiting gene expression has been firmly established. As genome sequences have become available for many bacteria, it has become possible to search for additional members of this regulatory family, and, eventually, to begin to understand how they act at the molecular level.

Simultaneously, researchers in eukaryotic systems were discovering the wonders of RNAi, a cellular strategy for protecting itself from RNA invaders, in which small …