General retardation of mRNA degradation caused by speB 5’ UTR partial deletion in Streptococcus pyogenes. Streptococcus pyogenes

The speB gene of Streptococcus pyogenes has a long 5' UTR with unknown functions. Preliminary studies showed that the partial mutation of this region led to altered expression patterns of the speB gene and ropB, its upstream gene. In this study, we used microarray to examine the effect of speB 5' UTR mutation on the S. pyogenes transcriptome. Overall design: The speB ORF and a large portion of the speB 5’ UTR (-1 to -527 from ATG) was replaced with an erythromycin resistant cassette gene (ermAM) to generate a ΔIG mutant. Transcriptome profiles of the wild-type (WT) and ΔIG mutant in the mid-exponential phase and early stationary phase (ST) were examined with microarray analysis.