Project description:Listeria monocytogenes is an important food-borne pathogen which is frequently linked to ready-to-eat vegetables. In this work it was investigated by RNA-seq how the colonization of corn salad leaves and the commonly used packaging material polystyrene impacts on the transcriptome of L. monocytogenes NCTC 10887 at 4 °C and 22 °C. The strongest transcriptional differences occurred on corn salad at 4 °C versus polystyrene at 4 °C, yielding 2,629 differentially expressed genes (91.6% of protein-coding genes), indicating a habitat driven shift under cold-chain conditions. Corn salad promoted regulation of virulence related genes. The prfA gene was upregulated on corn salad compared to polystyrene at both temperatures (log2FC 2.43 at 22 °C and 4.16 at 4 °C), accompanied by increased hly (2.70), inlA (4.46), and inlB (2.10) expression at 4 °C. Stress/proteostasis gene expression was elevated on corn salad, including higher transcripts of clpP (3.34–3.51), clpE (5.58–6.89), and clpB (2.08–3.74), consistent with a stressed yet persistence-prone state on leaf surfaces. This indicates that L. monocytogenes persisting on leafy greens can remain transcriptionally primed for host interaction at 4 °C, implying that refrigeration alone may not mitigate risk on ready-to-eat produce, underlining the importance of pre-harvest hygiene.
Project description:The goal of the project is to produce a standard annotation of the loci producing small RNAs in the maize genome. To achieve this goal we produced small RNA libraries from four different maize tissues, which will allow the identification of tissue-specific small RNA expression. The availability of bilogical replicates for three of the four tissues analyzed will guarantee robustness in the small RNA genes identification process.