MY JOB AND THE UNIT IN WHICH I WORK

WINNING ABSTRACT: The World Health Organization estimates that each year 3 million people die from tuberculosis (TB) and 8 million people become infected. No new anti-TB drugs have been introduced in the past 30 years, even though their development becomes increasingly important to face new challenges posed by multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant strains and by acute infection with M. tuberculosis of HIV positive patients. Owing to its apparently important role in RNA metabolism, the RNase E/G family of endoribonucleases can be considered as a promising target for antimicrobial drugs. This consideration promted us to characterise biochemical properties of the M. tuberculosis RNase E/G homologue. To learn more about specific properties of RNase E/G homologues a M. tuberculosis RNase E/G (MycRne) was overexpressed in E. coli and purified as a 6His-tagged polypeptide. To characterise MycRne, we used in vitro cleavage assays and primer extension analysis of total RNA extracted from mycobacteria. We show that affinity purified MycRne has an endoribonucleolytic activity, which is dependent on the 59-phosphorylation status of RNA. We could also show that RNase E/G has Mg2+ dependent activity and similar to E. coli RNase E, MycRne was able to cleave in an intercistronic region of the putative 9S precursor of 5S rRNA. Although, similar to E. coli RNase E, the mycobacterial RNase E/G homologue plays a role in rRNA processing, the substrate specificities of these enzymes show differences. This suggests that RNase E/G can be used as a promising target fo