Computational Prediction of sRNA in Acinetobacter baumannii.

Small RNAs in bacteria are noncoding RNAs that act as posttranscriptional regulators of gene expression. Over time, they have gained importance as fine-tuners of expression of genes involved in critical biological processes like metabolism, fitness, virulence, and antibiotic resistance. The availability of various high-throughput strategies enable the detection of these molecules but are technically challenging and time-intensive. Thus, to fulfil the need of a simple computational algorithm pipeline to predict these sRNAs in bacterial species, we detail a user-friendly ensemble method with specific application in Acinetobacter spp. The developed algorithms primarily look for intergenic regions in the genome of related Acinetobacter spp., thermodynamic stability, and conservation of RNA secondary structures to generate a model input for the sRNAPredict3 tool which utilizes all this information to generate a list of putative sRNA. We confirmed the accuracy of the method by comparing its output with the RNA-seq data and found the method to be faster and more accurate for Acinetobacter baumannii ATCC 17978. Thus, this method improves the identification of sRNA in Acinetobacter and other bacterial species.