In a paper published online in advance in Genome Biology this week, researchers at the University of Würzburg in Germany report their use of a differential RNA-seq approach with specific enrichment of primary transcripts to define the "transcriptome of purified elementary bodies and reticulate bodies of C.[Chlamydia] pneumoniae strain CWL-029." The Würzburg team mapped 565 transcriptional start sites of annotated genes and novel transcripts, and identified "a distinct transcription start site or an affiliation to an operon" for 862 out of 1074 annotated protein-coding genes. Overall, the researchers suggest that "the precise transcriptional landscape as a complement to the genome sequence will provide new insights into the organization, control and function of genes" in this human pathogen.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Aindrila Mukhopadhyay and her colleagues report in Genome Biology this week their "systematic mapping of the genes regulated by all transcriptionally acting response regulators in a single bacterium," Desulfovibrio vulgaris. In its study, the Mukhopadhyay group predicted new genes and regulatory networks, "which found corroboration in a compendium of transcriptome data available for D. vulgaris." Mukhopadhyay et al. add that their "in vitro array-based method … is generally applicable for the study of such systems in all organisms."