Temperature-dependent sRNA transcriptome of the Lyme disease spirochete.

Our study demonstrates that sRNAs are abundant and differentially expressed by environmental conditions suggesting that gene regulation via sRNAs is a common mechanism utilized in B. burgdorferi. In addition, the identification of antisense and intragenic sRNAs impacts the broadly used loss-of-function genetic approach used to study gene function and increases the coding potential of a small genome. To facilitate access to the analyzed RNA-seq data we have set-up a website at http://www.cibiv.at/~niko/bbdb/ that includes a UCSC browser track hub. By clicking on the respective link, researchers can interactively inspect the data in the UCSC genome browser (Kent et al., Genome Res 12:996-1006, 2002).