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. mRNA profiles of ciclopirox treatment with or without sublethal concentration in wild type (WT) were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq 2500.