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closesRNA in an important pathogen
Posted by collinm on 03 Mar 2010 at 10:01 GMT
This excellent manuscript by Perez et al. describes the identification of potential small regulatory RNAs in Streptococcus pyogenes. This is of great interest since only a few sRNAs have been identified in this important pathogen, and the fact that sRNAs have been shown to be important in other bacterial pathogens in regulating virulence.
The main conclusions from this paper are the identification of 40 new potential sRNAS, the expression profiles of a number of them, and importantly the exclusion of pel as an important sRNA.
The authors decision to analyze pel further makes complete sense; this has been suggested by others to be an important regulator, but is by this study quite conclusively removed from the list of regulators to focus further on. What puzzles me though, is why the authors that are so clearly competent in genetic manipulation of GAS are not analyzing any of the other identified sRNAs for global effects? This is not essential for the scientific quality of the manuscript, but would certainly have made it even more interesting. I wonder if the authors did such attempts or is it is this saved for a follow up study?