Using two very different but highly complementary high-throughput approaches we unearthed the RNA-binding proteome in two clinically-relevant Staphylococcus aureus strains.

We show that our data is highly enriched for metabolic enzymes, in particular those with Rossmann folds.

Moreover, we find that many HTH domain transcription factors also bind RNA, suggesting that they also play a global role in post-transcriptional regulation.

We demonstrate that the CcpA transcription factor also uses HTH domain sequences to bind dsRNA with comparable affinities. 

Our work should provide the bacterial RNA community with a great resource which will hopefully open up many new avenues for future research.

This work was done in collaboration with the groups of Alexander von Kriegsheim and Benedikt Beckmann!