The ample world of riboswitches

Constantly changing environment requires bacteria to respond quickly and decisively at the cellular level. Notwithstanding, bacteria operate with a limited set of resources restricted to a single cell at their disposal. The natural effect of this state of things for bacteria was a development of a variety of different mechanisms for gene expression control. Among them, riboswitches, defined as sequences present in transcripts with their ability of direct binding low-molecular metabolites and inducing a regulatory response, are considered to be one of the most interesting mechanism of gene regulation. In this publication, there is presented current state of knowledge concerning riboswitches, including such aspects as: mechanisms of action of riboswitches, their structure and diversity as well as their distribution. Furthermore, the history of their discovery at the beginning of the 21st century, and current research that may find future, practical applications.