Structural and functional features of eukaryotic mRNA untranslated regions

The crucial role of the non-coding portion of genomes is now widely acknowledged. In particular, mRNA untranslated regions are involved in many post-transcriptional regulatory pathways that control mRNA localization, stability and translation efficiency. We review in this paper the major structural and compositional features of eukaryotic mRNA untranslated regions and provide some examples of bioinformatic analyses for their functional characterization. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.