RNA regulation in pathogenic bacteria

Bacteria are versatile organisms, which exert a significant impact on ecosystem or represent an issue for public health because of nosocomial infections and emergence of multiple antibiotic resistances. They develop diverse strategies to quickly adapt their growth to external signals, environmental changes or stress. The improvement of high-throughput sequencing techniques on pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria has revolutionized our understanding of a bacterial genome and has revealed unexpected aspects of genomic organization. Thus, a large part of the bacterial genome is transcribed generating an unsuspected number of multiple RNA classes of various sizes and structures. Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) and untranslated regions of mRNAs are key actors of post-transcriptional regulation whose impact on bacterial physiology and virulence has long been underestimated. Our challenge is to obtain a global and integrated view of the post-transcriptional control of gene expression and intricate links between transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulators in two model bacteria, Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. Two main axes are currently being studied:

• the translation initiation of structured mRNAs and its control in E. coli and S. aureus;
• Regulatory RNAs in S. aureus: function, mechanism of action and regulatory networks

We are supported by ANR and FRM grants and the team belongs to the Consortium NetRNA called “Laboratoires d’Excellence (LabEx) Investissement d’Avenir”.

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