Coat protein expression in bacteriophage MS2 for different hairpin mutants.

(A) Cartoon diagram of the secondary structure for the MS2 coat gene. Start codons for the various phage genes are indicated with a green bar, while stop codons are indicated with a red bar. The nucleotide sequence of the hairpin encompassing the coat gene start codon (dashed box in cartoon) is shown to the right. Mutants are labelled following [13]. (B) Fit of experimental relative coat protein expression data (red dots) to the theoretical expression curve (Eq 2). (C) Best fit linear line of the experimental measurements from [13] to Eq 4. (D) Predicted MS2 coat protein synthesis rates are calculated from 30 min of ribosome kinetics at a growth rate of μ = 0.7 doublings per hour using hairpin unfolding times ranging from τu = 0.01 to τu = 10 seconds (black dots). The best fit of the data to the theoretical protein expression curve (Eq 2) is represented by the black line.