Expression of intergenic regions of Synechococcus WH 7803 under environmentally relevant stresses

We constructed a tiling microarray, covering nearly all of the intergenic regions larger than 50 bp on both strands of the genome of the marine picocyanobacterium Synechococcus WH7803. We analyzed transcript levels from cultures grown under ecologically relevant stress conditions. The investigated stress conditions were cold stress, high light stress, phosphate depletion and iron depletion. We identified several previously unknown small RNAs, partially differentially expressed. The detected RNAs provide a starting point for further investigations on the acclimatisation to different stresses for Synechococcus WH7803. For every applied growth condition the cultures were grown in triplicates as were the respective controls. Respective controls were treated the same as the stressed bacterial cultures in terms of centrifugation and / or dilution. Bacteria were harvested by rapid filtering and directly freezed by liquid nitrogen.