Bacterial small RNA

Bacterial small RNAs are small RNAs produced by bacteria; they are 50- to 500-nucleotide non-coding RNA molecules, highly structured and containing several stem-loops.^[1][2] Numerous sRNAs have been identified using both computational analysis and laboratory-based techniques such as Northern blotting, microarrays and RNA-Seq^[3] in a number of bacterial species including Escherichia coli,^[4][5][6] the model pathogen Salmonella,^[7] the nitrogen-fixing alphaproteobacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti,^[8] marine cyanobacteria,^[9] Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia),^[10] Streptococcus pyogenes^[11], the pathogen Staphylococcus aureus^[12], and the plant pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pathovar oryzae.^[13] Bacterial sRNAs affect how genes are expressed within bacterial cells via interaction with mRNA or protein, and thus can affect a variety of bacterial functions like metabolism, virulence, environmental stress response, and structure.^[7][12]