Abstract

Transcriptional regulation, a multiple-step process, is still poorly understood in the important pig pathogen Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae. Basic motifs like promoters and terminators have already been described, but no other cis-regulatory elements have been found. DNA repeat sequences have been shown to be an interesting potential source of cis-regulatory elements. In this work, a genome-wide search for tandem and palindromic repetitive elements was performed in the intergenic regions of all coding sequences from M. hyopneumoniae strain 7448. Computational analysis demonstrated the presence of 144 tandem repeats and 1,171 palindromic elements. The DNA repeat sequences were distributed within the 5’ upstream regions of 86% of transcriptional units of M. hyopneumoniae strain 7448. Comparative analysis between distinct repetitive sequences found in related mycoplasma genomes demonstrated different percentages of conservation among pathogenic and nonpathogenic strains. qPCR assays revealed differential expression among genes showing variable numbers of repetitive elements. In addition, repeats found in 206 genes already described to be differentially regulated under different culture conditions of M. hyopneumoniae strain 232 showed almost 80% conservation in relation to M. hyopneumoniae strain 7448 repeats. Altogether, these findings suggest a potential regulatory role of tandem and palindromic DNA repeats in the M. hyopneumoniae transcriptional profile.

Highlights

  • Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae is a diminutive bacterium, characterized by a small genome (0.92 Mb) with a low GC content [1]

  • We could observed that PAL elements, in most of the cases, overlapped partially with PALG (Table 1) and PAL overlapping elements were excluded from further analysis

  • Prokaryote genomes are extremely diverse in terms of nucleotide composition and the presence of distinct patterns of repeat sequences that could affect the physical properties of DNA molecules [36]

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Summary

Introduction

Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae is a diminutive bacterium, characterized by a small genome (0.92 Mb) with a low GC content [1]. Transcription, a multi-step mechanism, is finely regulated in all forms of life and is still poorly understood in M.

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