Deinococcus radiodurans is an extremophile that can survival more than 3000 times of ionizing radiation than most vertebrates. Its extraordinary radioresistance has intrigued researchers for years but few studies have been done to investigate the transcriptome responses of D. radiodurans under acute irradiation. In bacteria, small regulatory non-coding RNAs (sRNA) are post-transcriptional regulators that have been identified in multiple species and shown to play important regulatory roles in many different processes, including responsive mechanism to environmental stresses in some well-studied pathogens like M. tuberculosis. In this study, we identified more than 200 potential sRNA candidates by deep-sequencing in D. radiodurans and confirmed the expression of 26 of them with large scale Northern blotting analysis. We also found 15 of the confirmed sRNAs show differentially expression after irradiated with acute dosage of ionizing radiation. Some of the sRNA candidates have also been found to be conserved in related radioresistive species and the expression of the homologies has been confirmed experimentally. A UV irradiation test was also performed to verify sRNAs that response to both ionizing and UV irradiation. The results of this study do not only identified many novel sRNAs in D. radiodurans, but also provide the insights to the regulatory mechanism of radioresistance in this and other extremophiles. Our results have also raised important questions about the cross-evolution of novel cellular capabilities.

Post-transcriptional regulation of cellular response to acute ionizing radiation

247th National Meeting (2014)

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