Regulation of Gene Expression in Response to Environmental Changes in Bacterial Pathogens

Dear Colleagues,

The ability of bacteria to gauge surroundings and modulate gene expression accordingly represents a crucial feature for their survival. In this respect, bacteria have evolved several transcriptional and posttranscriptional strategies that can act all along the gene expression process. The regulation of gene transcription is a fundamental process in all living organisms, where DNA-binding transcriptional regulators play a crucial role. Bacteria typically enroll an arsenal of transcriptional regulators to orchestrate gene transcription in response to external stimuli. Once an environmental signal is perceived, it is transduced to invoke specific molecular mechanisms controlling transcription of genes coding for proteins capable of assisting the adaptation to the new condition. Transcriptional responses can be under either positive or negative control mediated by dedicated regulatory proteins. Positive regulation exploits specific alternative sigma factors to redirect the RNA polymerase enzyme to a subset of selected promoters, transcriptional activators, or their combination, while negative regulation is mediated by transcriptional repressors. Interestingly, in some microorganisms these two opposite strategies coexist, establishing complex regulatory networks. In addition to regulatory proteins, small RNAs (sRNAs) are widely adopted by bacteria in response to changes in the environment. Accumulating studies on bacterial regulatory processes clearly established that sRNAs modulate their target gene expression generally at the post-transcriptional level. Understanding the complexity of such networks requires a combination of interdisciplinary approaches such as molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics together with novel high-throughput genomics techniques, bioinformatics, and computational analyses.

This Special Issue of Microorganisms will be dedicated to pooling together aspects of the aforementioned topics, providing forefront studies and perspectives in the field of bacterial pathogens networks biology.

Prof. Dr. Vincenzo Scarlato
Prof. Dr. Davide Roncarati
Guest Editors

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