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Essentiality, not expressiveness, drives gene-strand bias in bacteria

Abstract

Preferential positioning of bacterial genes in the leading strand was thought to result from selection to avoid high head-on collision rates between DNA and RNA polymerases. Here we show, however, that in Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli, essentiality (the transcript product), not expressiveness (the collision rate), selectively drives the biased gene distribution.

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Figure 1: Distribution of genes between the leading (dark gray) and the lagging (light gray) strands of the genome of B. subtilis (a) and E. coli (b).

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Blanchard, F. Dionísio and F. Taddei for comments and criticisms on the manuscript and the scientists who disrupted and studied all the genes of the B. subtilis genome, in particular those who made the enterprise happen: S. D. Ehrlich, F. Kunst, N. Ogasawara and H. Yoshikawa.

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Correspondence to Eduardo P C Rocha.

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Rocha, E., Danchin, A. Essentiality, not expressiveness, drives gene-strand bias in bacteria. Nat Genet 34, 377–378 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1209

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