E. coli - attenuation & trp operon. Verify please?

Yes, I believe you are correct.

Attenuation (in genetics) is a proposed mechanism of control in some bacterial operons which results in premature termination of transcription and which is based on the fact that, in bacteria, transcription and translation proceed simultaneously.

Thank you.  Does the premature stop codon cause a hairpin structure like in trp operon attenuation? I'm thinking "no".

To be honest, I have no idea if it is the stop codon that causes the hairpin loop to form

Sorry

Related topic...

A mutant mammalian gene has a premature stop codon in exon 1 but a Western blot shows no truncated protein. A plasmid is cloned from the wild-type gene and the mutant gene's premature stop codon is inserted at the same position. After transfecting the mutant plasmid into the mutant gene, the Western blot now shows the truncated protein. Why?

My guess...
Confused because the premature stop codon is in exon1.

I have no idea, bro. If you happen to figure it out, please shed some light because I'm throwing blanks.

Referring to your question about the mammalian gene--
I'm not sure if this is correct, but it would seem logical that if the protein is not truncated then the stop codon must have been removed during splicing. You don't know how many exons and introns this gene has, right? Maybe with this form of the protein, exon 1 is normally spliced out so the stop codon is not present in the mRNA and the transcribed protein is normal length.

If the gene is in a plasmid, however, maybe the spliceosome does not work properly. Exon 1 would now be present and the stop codon would be in the mRNA and halt transcription resulting in a truncated protein. Usually when we clone DNA into a plasmid we use a cDNA copy made from the mRNA so it contains no introns and does not need to be spliced.

Let me know what you think of this idea. I would like to know the answer myself.