期刊
JOURNAL OF BACTERIOLOGY
卷 194, 期 22, 页码 6217-6232出版社
AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY
DOI: 10.1128/JB.01055-12
关键词
-
类别
资金
- Novartis fellowship from the Ph.D. Program in Functional Biology of Molecular and Cellular Systems of the University of Bologna
- Novartis fellowship from the Ph.D. Program in Mathematical Logic, Computer Science, and Bioinformatics of the University of Siena
Neisseria meningitidis is the major cause of septicemia and meningococcal meningitis. During the course of infection, the bacterium must adapt to different host environments as a crucial factor for survival and dissemination; in particular, one of the crucial factors in N. meningitidis pathogenesis is the ability to grow and survive in human blood. We recently showed that N. meningitidis alters the expression of 30% of the open reading frames (ORFs) of the genome during incubation in human whole blood and suggested the presence of fine regulation at the gene expression level in order to control this step of pathogenesis. In this work, we used a customized tiling oligonucleotide microarray to define the changes in the whole transcriptional profile of N. meningitidis in a time course experiment of ex vivo bacteremia by incubating bacteria in human whole blood and then recovering RNA at different time points. The application of a newly developed bioinformatic tool to the tiling array data set allowed the identification of new transcripts-small intergenic RNAs, cis-encoded antisense RNAs, mRNAs with extended 5' and 3' untranslated regions (UTRs), and operons-differentially expressed in human blood. Here, we report a panel of expressed small RNAs, some of which can potentially regulate genes involved in bacterial metabolism, and we show, for the first time in N. meningitidis, extensive antisense transcription activity. This analysis suggests the presence of a circuit of regulatory RNA elements used by N. meningitidis to adapt to proliferate in human blood that is worthy of further investigation.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据