MIMS and FIMM collaboration: Stress responses in cross-microbial species are disclosed
The Fällman group has published a new article in Nature Communications with the title: “RNA atlas of human bacterial pathogens uncovers stress dynamics linked to infection”. The project involved collaboration with researchers at FIMM/University of Helsinki.
Bacterial pathogens have to cope with stressful environments in human host. Their response with the activity of gene products enables them to adapt to those stressful environments and cause troublesome infections. Therefore, genes involved in the adaptation are potential targets for new antimicrobials.
Researchers of this study has exposed 32 different bacterial human pathogens to 11 stress conditions mimicking human host environments and catalogued their transcriptome. Investigation of over 100 000 genes enabled them to identify stress responsive genes, common and unique regulatory responses, and processes participating in different stress responses. By comparing the gene expressions to publicly available data, they could show that these responses are employed during infection of two clinically important pathogens, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. They have shown that a significant proportion of responses is originated from known and putative novel non-coding RNAs, indicating existence of potential novel ncRNAs in the dataset to be discovered. The RNA atlas is deposited on an interactive and user-friendly webpage at www.pathogenex.org.
Read the full article on the MIMS website.