Paper: Transcriptional coupling to supercoiling in Bacteria

ABSTRACT: Transcription and DNA supercoiling are involved in a complex, dynamical and nonlinear coupling that results from the basal interaction between DNA and RNA Polymerase. We present the first software to simulate this coupling, applicable to a wide range of bacterial organisms. TwisTranscripT allows quantifying its contribution in global transcriptional regulation, and provides a mechanistic basis for the widely observed, evolutionarily conserved, and currently unexplained co-regulation of adjacent operons that might play an important role in genome evolution. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: TwisTranscripT is freely available at https://github.com/sammeyer2017/TwisTranscripT. It is implemented in Python3 and supported on MacOS X, Linux and Windows.