A TECHNIQUE for “freezing” gene expression has revealed which genes the food-poisoning bacterium Salmonella uses when it infects a cell.
Salmonella enterica kills more people than any other food-borne pathogen, and many of its strains are becoming drug-resistant. Finding out what goes on when the bacteria invade cells could speed up the search for new antibiotics.
This task has proved very difficult despite the sequencing of Salmonella’s genome. The standard technique for working out which genes are being expressed is to extract messenger RNA, which relays information from genes to a cell’s protein-making machinery.
The snag is that bacterial mRNA…
