How to adapt to a changing environment is a fundamental, recurrent problem confronting
cells. One solution is for cells to organize their constituents into a limited number of spatially …

Since the nucleoid was isolated from bacteria in the 1970s, two fundamental questions
emerged and are still in the spotlight: how bacteria organize their chromosomes to fit inside …

Cruciforms occur when inverted repeat sequences in double-stranded DNA adopt intra-
strand hairpins on opposing strands. Biophysical and molecular studies of these structures …

Genomes of all organisms are persistently threatened by endogenous and exogenous
assaults. Bacterial mechanisms of genome maintenance must provide protection throughout …

Plasmids are self-replicative DNA elements that are transferred between bacteria. Plasmids
encode not only antibiotic resistance genes but also adaptive genes that allow their hosts to …

RNA-binding proteins play myriad roles in regulating RNAs and RNA-mediated functions. In
bacteria, the RNA chaperone Hfq is an important post-transcriptional gene regulator. Using …

The histone‐like protein HU plays a diverse role in bacterial physiology from the
maintenance of chromosome structure to the regulation of gene transcription. HU binds DNA …

The bacterial chromosomic DNA is packed within a membrane-less structure, the nucleoid,
due to the association of DNA with proteins called Nucleoid Associated Proteins (NAPs) …

This study aims to explore whether and how positive and negative supercoiling contribute to
the three-dimensional (3D) organization of the bacterial genome. We used recently …

Bacterial chromosome topology is controlled by topoisomerases and nucleoid-associated
proteins (NAPs). While topoisomerases regulate DNA supercoiling, NAPs introduce bends …