Abstract
In the last decade, the implementation of high‐throughput methods for RNA profiling has uncovered that a large part of the bacterial genome is transcribed well beyond the boundaries of known genes. Therefore, the transcriptional space of a gene very often invades the space of a neighbouring gene, creating large regions of overlapping transcription. The biological significance of these findings was initially regarded with scepticism. However, mounting evidence suggests that overlapping transcription between neighbouring genes conforms to regulatory purposes and provides new strategies for coordinating bacterial gene expression. In this MicroReview, considering the discoveries made in a pioneering transcriptome analysis performed on Listeria monocytogenes as a starting point, we discuss the progress in understanding the biological meaning of overlapping transcription that has given rise to the excludon concept. We also discuss new conditional transcriptional termination events that create antisense RNAs depending on the metabolite concentrations and new genomic arrangements, known as noncontiguous operons, which contain an interspersed gene that is transcribed in the opposite direction to the rest of the operon.
Highlights
It has been a decade since the publication of the first complete unbiased transcriptome analysis in the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes (Toledo-Arana et al, 2009)
This seminal study used high-resolution tiling microarrays to investigate the transcriptional profiles of wild-type and transcriptional regulatory mutants of Listeria monocytogenes grown in several conditions: (a) in vitro; (b) ex vivo; and (c) in vivo
The finding that overlapping between 5′ and 3′ UTRs of contiguous genes is common in bacterial genomes together with the fact that RNase III digests sense/antisense overlapping transcripts inspired the Cossart's and Sorek's groups to propose a new paradigm of regulation based on overlapping transcription, termed ‘excludon’ (Sesto, Wurtzel, Archambaud, Sorek, & Cossart, 2013)
Summary
It has been a decade since the publication of the first complete unbiased transcriptome analysis in the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes (Toledo-Arana et al, 2009). KEYWORDS antisense RNA, excludon, noncontiguous operon, overlapping transcription, UTRs This review will describe how the initial observations showing frequent overlapping between transcripts of the neighbouring genes in the Listeria transcriptome
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