Abstract
Preferential positioning of bacterial genes in the leading strand was thought to result from selection to avoid high head-on collision rates between DNA and RNA polymerases. Here we show, however, that in Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli, essentiality (the transcript product), not expressiveness (the collision rate), selectively drives the biased gene distribution.
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Acknowledgements
We thank A. Blanchard, F. Dionísio and F. Taddei for comments and criticisms on the manuscript and the scientists who disrupted and studied all the genes of the B. subtilis genome, in particular those who made the enterprise happen: S. D. Ehrlich, F. Kunst, N. Ogasawara and H. Yoshikawa.
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Rocha, E., Danchin, A. Essentiality, not expressiveness, drives gene-strand bias in bacteria. Nat Genet 34, 377–378 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1209
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1209
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