ONT-cappable-seq: a new approach to explore the transcriptional architecture of bacterial viruses
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Bacterial viruses (phages) recognize their microbial host, infect it and convert the cell into a virus-producing machine within a matter of minutes.
Classical RNA-sequencing has become the method of choice to study the transcriptional landscape of phage-infected bacteria. However, short-read RNA sequencing approaches generally fail to capture key transcriptional features in dense viral genomes, such as operon structures and transcription start and termination sites.
The elucidation of these elements is fundamental to achieve a global understanding of gene regulation mechanisms during the infection process, to ultimately help develop alternative strategies to combat bacterial pathogens and for the development of SynBio applications inspired by phages.