Figure 1

Interaction of microRNA with protein translation process. Four mechanisms of translation repression which are considered in the mathematical modeling are indicated: 1) on the initiation process, preventing assembling of the initiation complex; 2) on a late initiation step, such as searching for the start codon; 3) on the ribosome assembly; 4) on the translation process. There exist other mechanisms of microRNA action on protein translation (transcriptional, transport to P-bodies, ribosome drop-off, co-translational protein degradation and others) that are not considered in this paper. Here 40S and 60S are light and heavy components of the ribosome, 80S is the assembled ribosome bound to mRNA, eIF4F is an translation initiation factor, PABC1 is the Poly-A binding protein, "cap" is the mRNA cap structure needed for mRNA circularization, RISC is the RNA-induced silencing complex.