Lost in translation: Small non-coding RNA's, hidden players in big decisions?

The aim of this project is to gain insight in the relation between the sRNA (small non-coding RNA) mediated regulation and known transcriptional networks in bacteria. The key research questions will be the identification of the mechanisms that trigger the expression of sRNAs, on the one hand, and the detection of target genes for which the expression is mediated by these sRNAs on the other hand. An important consideration when identifying such regulatory interactions, is their condition-dependency. Experiments conducted under inappropriate conditions might yield irrelevant results, a notion that is generally overlooked in current state-of-the-art publications. The selection of the relevant conditions, however, is far from trivial if no a priori information on the sRNA and its function exists. Indeed, finding the true conditions in which an sRNA is activated and interacts with its predicted targets will require the insurmountable task of experimentally validating all targets and sRNA regulators in a vast range of possible experimental conditions. Therefore, we present an anlysis flow to pinpoint relevant conditions by exploiting publicly available experimental information. In silico identified sRNA regulators and their targets will subsequently be experimentally validated in the identified conditions. This will result in a global view on sRNA mediated regulation in bacteria. Further exploration of the sRNA network and comparative analysis between bacterial organisms will provide greater insight into the evolution of these networks.

Keywords:Regulation networks, Transcription regulation, Prokaryote, sRNA

Disciplines:Microbiology, Systems biology, Laboratory medicine, Scientific computing, Bioinformatics and computational biology, Public health care, Public health services