MRC National Institute for Medical Research, London
Science for Health
RNA regulatory networks in Mycobacterium tuberculosis
07 November 2011
Scientists from NIMR and the Sanger Institute have explored RNA regulatory networks in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The research is published in PLoS Pathogens.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis presents a major threat to global health, causing around 10 million new cases of tuberculosis and 2 million deaths every year. Most people infected with M. tuberculosis remain asymptomatic, termed latent TB, and we still do not understood what controls the transition from latent to active TB. Understanding how the bacteria change from a harmless persistent form to an aggressive disease-causing form is an important step towards development of better drug therapy . The key to this is in knowing how the bacteria determine which of their genes to express at different times.
During the course of infection, M. tuberculosis has to adapt to survival in a range of different microenvironments, combining persistence in a non-replicating state with periods of active cell division. Transcriptional regulation in response to environmental change has been extensively analyzed in M. tuberculosis. Less attention has been given to the potential role in M. tuberculosis of regulatory processes that occur subsequent to the initiation of transcription. These are often mediated by RNA.
Kristine Arnvig, in Douglas Young’s lab in NIMR’s Division of Mycobacterial Research, collaborated with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to characterize the transcriptome of M. tuberculosis, with a particular focus on identification of the nature and extent of non-coding RNA. They uncovered a wide range of novel non-coding RNAs with the potential to influence patterns of gene expression in vitro and during infection.
We anticipate that this finding will open the way for new research that will allow us to understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying this deadly human disease, and that will help us to design better tools for prevention and treatment of TB.
Douglas Young
Original article
Sequence-based analysis uncovers an abundance of non-coding RNA in the total transcriptome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Kristine B. Arnvig, Iñaki Comas, Nicholas R. Thomson, Joanna Houghton, Helena I. Boshoff, Nicholas J. Croucher, Graham Rose, Timothy T. Perkins, Julian Parkhill, Gordon Dougan, Douglas B. Young (2011)
PLoS Pathogens, 7(11): e1002342. Full-text
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