New RNA-seq approaches for the study of bacterial pathogens

Abstract

Understanding how bacteria cause disease requires knowledge of which genes are expressed and how they are regulated during infection. While RNA-seq is now a routine method for gene expression analysis in bacterial pathogens, the past years have also witnessed a surge of novel RNA-seq based approaches going beyond standard mRNA profiling. These include variations of the technique to capture post-transcriptional networks controlled by small RNAs and to discover associated RNA-binding proteins in the pathogen itself. Dual RNA-seq analyzing pathogen and host simultaneously has revealed roles of noncoding RNAs during infection and enabled the correlation of bacterial gene activity with specific host responses. Single-cell RNA-seq studies have addressed how heterogeneity among individual host cells may determine infection outcomes.