Tanwer Pooja, Bauer Susanne, Heinrichs Elisabeth, Panda Gurudutta, Saluja Daman, Rudel Thomas, Beier Dagmar
Chair of Microbiology, University of Würzburg, Biocenter, Germany.
Dr B R Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research, University of Delhi, India.
Microbiology (Reading). 2017 Jul;163(7):1081-1092. doi: 10.1099/mic.0.000484. Epub 2017 Jul 21.
Small non-coding RNAs (sRNAs) are well-established post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression in bacteria that respond to a variety of environmental stimuli. They usually act by base-pairing with their target mRNAs, which is commonly facilitated by the RNA chaperone Hfq. In this study we initiated the analysis of the sRNA FnrS of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which is induced under anaerobic conditions. We identified four putative FnrS target genes using bioinformatics approaches and validated these target genes using translational reporter gene fusions in both Escherichia coli and N. gonorrhoeae, thereby demonstrating their downregulation by direct base-pairing between the respective mRNA and FnrS. We demonstrate deregulation of target mRNAs upon deletion of fnrS and provide evidence that the isc gene cluster required for iron-sulfur cluster biosynthesis, which harbours iscS, which is a direct target of FnrS, is coordinately downregulated by the sRNA. By mutational analysis we show that, surprisingly, three distinct regions of FnrS are employed for interaction with different target genes.
