Abstract
Neisseria gonorrhoeae is capable of causing gonorrhoea and more complex diseases in the human host. Neisseria meningitidis is a closely related pathogen that shares many of the same genomic features and virulence factors, but causes the life threatening diseases meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia. The importance of non-coding RNAs in gene regulation has become increasingly evident having been demonstrated to be involved in regulons responsible for iron acquisition, antigenic variation, and virulence. Neisseria spp. contain an IS-like element, the Correia Repeat Enclosed Element, which has been predicted to be mobile within the genomes or to have been in the past. This repeat, present in over 100 copies in the genome, has the ability to alter gene expression and regulation in several ways. We reveal here that Correia Repeat Enclosed Elements tend to be near non-coding RNAs in the Neisseria spp., especially N. gonorrhoeae. These results suggest that Correia Repeat Enclosed Elements may have disrupted ancestral regulatory networks not just through their influence on regulatory proteins but also for non-coding RNAs.
Highlights
Gonorrhoea poses a global threat that may become virtually untreatable due to antibiotic resistance, including increasing prevalence of azithromycin-resistant isolates [1,2,3,4] resulting in unsuccessful first-line dual treatment with ceftriaxone and azithromycin
This study investigated whether Correia Repeat Enclosed Elements (CREE) are located near predicted small ncRNAs in N. gonorrhoeae, N. meningitidis, and N. lactamica
Between 760 and 996 ncRNAs were predicted to be present in these Neisseria spp. genomes (Table 1, Table S1 to Table S8)
Summary
Gonorrhoea poses a global threat that may become virtually untreatable due to antibiotic resistance, including increasing prevalence of azithromycin-resistant isolates [1,2,3,4] resulting in unsuccessful first-line dual treatment with ceftriaxone and azithromycin. Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) can be important regulators of gene expression with roles in both physiology and disease [11,12]. Small ncRNAs have been shown to be involved in regulatory networks and gene expression in the Neisseria spp. Small ncRNA aniS was annotated as a coding sequence (NMB1205 in the meningococcus and NGO0796 in the gonococcus), leading to its inclusion in the design of microarrays that have shown its differential expression [13,21,22,23,24,25,26]. RNA-seq and transposon insertion site sequence mapping identified 253 ncRNAs in Neisseria gonorrhoeae [28]; 59 are intergenic and nine were validated by Northern blotting. Three new ncRNA transcripts were confirmed in the Neisseria gonorrhoeae MS11 strain
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