doi: 10.1093/nar/gku762 Transcriptional landscape and essential genes of Neisseria gonorrhoeae

The WHO has recently classified Neisseria gonor-rhoeae as a super-bacterium due to the rapid spread of antibiotic resistant derivatives and an overall dra-matic increase in infection incidences. Genome se-quencing has identified potential genes, however, lit-tle is known about the transcriptional organization and the presence of non-coding RNAs in gonococci. We performed RNA sequencing to define the tran-scriptome and the transcriptional start sites of all gonococcal genes and operons. Numerous new tran-scripts including 253 potentially non-coding RNAs transcribed from intergenic regions or antisense to coding genes were identified. Strikingly, strong an-tisense transcription was detected for the phase-variable opa genes coding for a family of adhesins and invasins in pathogenic Neisseria, that may have regulatory functions. Based on the defined transcrip-tional start sites, promoter motifs were identified. We further generated and sequenced a high den-sity Tn5 transposon library to predict a core of 827 gonococcal essential genes, 133 of which have no known function. Our combined RNA-Seq and Tn-Seq approach establishes a detailed map of gonococcal genes and defines the first core set of essential gono-coccal genes