Effects of RNase Y mutation on operon organization of Streptococcus pyogenes NZ131. Streptococcus pyogenes

Purpose: RNase Y is a major enzyme responsible for mRNA degradation in Streptococcus pyogenes. The goals of this study are to understand whether RNase Y plays a role in operon transcription of S. pyogenes NZ131 by using RNA-seq analysis. Methods: S. pyogenes mRNA profiles of wild type (WT) and RNase Y mutant (∆rny) were generated by deep sequencing, in duplicate, using Illumina Hiseq 2000. The sequence reads were aligned to the S. pyogenes genome using Bowtie2. The aligned files were sorted to BAM format and indexed using Samtools. The read depth of each base was derived from BAM files using BEDtools. Operon organization of S. pyogenes WT and ∆rny strains were predicted based on base reads. Results: A total of 11 to 12 billion reads were obtained from each sample. More than 99% of these reads were mapped to the S. pyogenes genome. Predictions of operon organization using WT and ∆rny samples showed little difference between the two strains. Conclusions: Our result shows that the mutation of RNase Y does not affect the operon organization of S. pyogenes NZ131. Overall design: Operon organization of S. pyogenes NZ131 wild type (WT) and RNase Y mutant (∆rny) are compared by using RNA-seq analysis