Directional RNA-seq reveals highly complex condition-dependent transcriptomes in E. coli K12 through accurate full-length transcripts assembling

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Shan Li¹  Zhengchang Su¹  Xia Dong² 

[1] Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, College of Computing and Informatics, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd, NC 28223, Charlotte, USA;Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, College of Computing and Informatics, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd, NC 28223, Charlotte, USA;Eastern Bee Research Institute, College of Food Science, Yunnan Agricultural University, Kunming, Yunnan, P. R. China;

关键词: RNA-seq;    Prokaryote;    E. coli;    Transcriptome;    Assembly;    Transcription start site;    Alternative operon;    Antisense RNA;    Non-coding RNA;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-14-520

 received in 2013-04-22, accepted in 2013-07-27,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAlthough prokaryotic gene transcription has been studied over decades, many aspects of the process remain poorly understood. Particularly, recent studies have revealed that transcriptomes in many prokaryotes are far more complex than previously thought. Genes in an operon are often alternatively and dynamically transcribed under different conditions, and a large portion of genes and intergenic regions have antisense RNA (asRNA) and non-coding RNA (ncRNA) transcripts, respectively. Ironically, similar studies have not been conducted in the model bacterium E coli K12, thus it is unknown whether or not the bacterium possesses similar complex transcriptomes. Furthermore, although RNA-seq becomes the major method for analyzing the complexity of prokaryotic transcriptome, it is still a challenging task to accurately assemble full length transcripts using short RNA-seq reads.ResultsTo fill these gaps, we have profiled the transcriptomes of E. coli K12 under different culture conditions and growth phases using a highly specific directional RNA-seq technique that can capture various types of transcripts in the bacterial cells, combined with a highly accurate and robust algorithm and tool TruHMM (http://bioinfolab.uncc.edu/TruHmm_package/) for assembling full length transcripts. We found that 46.9 ~ 63.4% of expressed operons were utilized in their putative alternative forms, 72.23 ~ 89.54% genes had putative asRNA transcripts and 51.37 ~ 72.74% intergenic regions had putative ncRNA transcripts under different culture conditions and growth phases.ConclusionsAs has been demonstrated in many other prokaryotes, E. coli K12 also has a highly complex and dynamic transcriptomes under different culture conditions and growth phases. Such complex and dynamic transcriptomes might play important roles in the physiology of the bacterium. TruHMM is a highly accurate and robust algorithm for assembling full-length transcripts in prokaryotes using directional RNA-seq short reads.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Li et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.