查看文章

Bacterial small non‐coding RNAs (sRNAs) are being recognized as novel widespread regulators of gene expression in response to environmental signals. Here, we present the first search for sRNA‐encoding genes in the nitrogen‐fixing endosymbiont Sinorhizobium meliloti, performed by a genome‐wide computational analysis of its intergenic regions. Comparative sequence data from eight related α‐proteobacteria were obtained, and the interspecies pairwise alignments were scored with the programs eQRNA and RNAz as complementary predictive tools to identify conserved and stable secondary structures corresponding to putative non‐coding RNAs. Northern experiments confirmed that eight of the predicted loci, selected among the original 32 candidates as most probable sRNA genes, expressed small transcripts. This result supports the combined use of eQRNA and RNAz as a robust strategy to identify …