A Novel Noncoding RNA Involved in Heat Stress Tolerance in .

is an extremely resistant bacteria that has evolved masterful strategies to enable survival under various environmental stress conditions. Heat stress is a major environmental stress factor that can cause denaturation of proteins, membrane disruption, and oxidative stress. Previous studies have examined the mechanisms of the heat stress response by analyzing changes in protein levels; however, little is known about the role of small noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), which are known to play important regulatory functions in bacteria during various environmental stress response. The ncRNA of was previously identified by RNA-seq and Northern blot. In this study, we showed that the transcription level of was up-regulated 4.2-fold under heat stress by qRT-PCR analysis. Heat tolerance assay showed that deleting significantly inhibited the viability under high temperature conditions. To assess the influence of on the transcriptome, 157 genes were found differentially expressed in the knock-out mutant by RNA-seq experiment. Combining RNA-seq and in silico analysis, we found that (tRNA modification GTPase) and (arginase) were likely to be the direct targets of . Further microscale thermophoresis results demonstrated that can directly bind to the mRNA of and . Our results indicated that can enhance the tolerance to heat stress of by binding to and mRNA. Overall, these results extend our understanding of ncRNA regulation and provide new insights into the heat stress response in .