The Escherichia coli transcriptome mostly consists of independently regulated modules

Anand Sastry, Ye Gao, Richard Szubin, Ying Hefner, Sibei Xu, Donghyuk Kim, Kumari Sonal Choudhary, Laurence Yang, Zachary A. King, Bernhard O. Palsson*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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Abstract

Underlying cellular responses is a transcriptional regulatory network (TRN) that modulates gene expression. A useful description of the TRN would decompose the transcriptome into targeted effects of individual transcriptional regulators. Here, we apply unsupervised machine learning to a diverse compendium of over 250 high-quality Escherichia coli RNA-seq datasets to identify 92 statistically independent signals that modulate the expression of specific gene sets. We show that 61 of these transcriptomic signals represent the effects of currently characterized transcriptional regulators. Condition-specific activation of signals is validated by exposure of E. coli to new environmental conditions. The resulting decomposition of the transcriptome provides: a mechanistic, systems-level, network-based explanation of responses to environmental and genetic perturbations; a guide to gene and regulator function discovery; and a basis for characterizing transcriptomic differences in multiple strains. Taken together, our results show that signal summation describes the composition of a model prokaryotic transcriptome.
Original languageEnglish
Article number5536
JournalNature Communications
Volume10
Number of pages14
ISSN2041-1723
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

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