Bacterial RNAs
From Wiki CEINGE
Bacterial genomes are generally compact and most of their sequence is involved in protein coding, but a growing number of sequences, mostly located within the intergenic regions, have been shown to play a role in the control of gene expression. Many of these sequences are active as RNA and often contain simple stem-loop structures, essential to their functionality. A large collection of families of repeated stem-loop containing sequences has been identified by clustering stemloop structures according to sequence similarity in 40 bacterial species, representative of the whole bacterial world. Secondary structure analysis reveals the presence of a large number of sequences where a conserved secondary structure may be demonstrated within the family.
