Bacterial non-coding RNAs: looking for genes and functions

by Francis Repoila (INRA)

Friday 24 Oct 2008, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Stockholm

MTC room A 302

Small non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have emerged as key regulators adjusting bacterial physiology to environmental cues. NcRNAs act either by base-pairing to mRNAs and change their translation efficiency, or by binding to proteins and modulate their activity. Thereby ncRNAs affect all steps of gene expression and are involved in major biological processes (transcription, cell division, protein secretion, envelope homeostasis, virulence, etc). In spite of their importance, ncRNA-encoding genes remain very difficult “to see” within genome sequences and their functional studies is quite challenging. I will overview the post-genomic approaches we have been using to find new ncRNAs and approach their function in Escherichia coli and Listeria monocytogenes. Then, I will present our ongoing work in Enterococcus faecalis, where I will summarize the approaches we are using to search for ncRNA encoding genes and the functional studies in progress.