Published In

Genome Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2011

Subjects

Bacterial genomes, Non-coding RNA, Escherichia coli -- Genetics, Carrier proteins

Abstract

The intergenic regions in bacterial genomes can contain regulatory leader sequences and small RNAs (sRNAs), which both serve to modulate gene expression. Computational analyses have predicted the presence of hundreds of these noncoding regulatory RNAs in Escherichia coli; however, only about 80 have been experimentally validated. By applying a deep-sequencing approach, we detected and quantified the vast majority of the previously validated regulatory elements and identified 10 new sRNAs and nine new regulatory leader sequences in the intergenic regions of E. coli. Half of the newly discovered sRNAs displayed enhanced stability in the presence of the RNA-binding protein Hfq, which is vital to the function of many of the known E. coli sRNAs. Whereas previous methods have often relied on phylogenetic conservation to identify regulatory leader sequences, only five of the newly discovered E. coli leader sequences were present in the genomes of other enteric species. For those newly identified regulatory elements having orthologs in Salmonella, evolutionary analyses showed that these regions encoded new noncoding elements rather than small, unannotated protein-coding transcripts. In addition to discovering new noncoding regulatory elements, we validated 53 sRNAs that were previously predicted but never detected and showed that the presence, within intergenic regions, of σ70 promoters and sequences with compensatory mutations that maintain stable RNA secondary structures across related species is a good predictor of novel sRNAs.

Description

This is the publisher's final pdf. Copyright (2011) CSH Press. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Version of record can be found at http;//dx.doi/10.1101/gr.119370.110

*At the time of publication, Professor Raghavan was affiliated with Yale University.

DOI

10.1101/gr.119370.110

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/17245

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