Profile of mRNA transcriptomes of E. coli affected by antifungal agent ciclopirox

Purpose: The identification of genes and regulatory pathways involved in the susceptibility to ciclopirox activity Methods: mRNA profiles of ciclopirox treatment in wild-type strain using Illumina sequencing. Results: Using an optimized data analysis workflow, we mapped about 1 million sequence reads per sample to the E. coli K-12 genome and identified 4,290 transcripts in wild-type with our without sublethal concentration of ciclopirox (12.5 ug/mL). Overall, this is the first genome-wide level analysis of ciclopirox as an antibacterial against Gram-negative bacteria and shown that >13 pathways were affected by ciclopirox with the change of expression level of >10 genes. Data analysis with CLRNASeq showed some differently expressed transcripts by ciclopirox treatment. Conclusions: Our study represents the first detailed analysis of ciclopirox-affected transcriptomes, with biologic replicates, generated by RNA-seq technology. The optimized data analysis workflows reported here should provide a framework for comparative investigations of expression profiles. Our results show that NGS offers a comprehensive and more accurate quantitative and qualitative evaluation of mRNA content within a cell or tissue. We conclude that RNA-seq based transcriptome characterization would expedite genetic network analyses and permit the dissection of complex biologic functions. Overall design: mRNA profiles of ciclopirox treatment with or without sublethal concentration in wild type (WT) were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq 2500.