Presence of Regulatory Mechanism Other than Feedback Inhibition in the Biosynthetic Pathway of Histidine Bacteria

Abstract The work was done so as to determine that there is a riboswitch for histidine as there are riboswitches for glycine and lysine and other amino acids. Histidine being such an important amino acid in the metabolism of an organism, there is a very high likelihood that its metabolism is to be regulated via mechanisms other than simple feedback inhibition mechanisms. The presence of mechanism of riboswitch acting like ribozyme as in case of glmS also indicates that ribozyme formation is a mechanism that can be present in other riboswitches too. Hence, hisG gene, which is the first gene in the biosynthetic pathway of histidine, was checked for the presence of a catalytic element in it and it was found that hisG mRNA can fold so as to behave as a catalytic mRNA. Although, no concrete experimental proof could be gathered due to the poor yield of the mRNA, an effort has been made to initiate a study that may lead to the discovery of a new riboswitch that will be the second one to be discovered after glmS to act as s ribozyme.