Transcription-replication interactions reveal principles of bacterial genome regulation

Organisms determine the transcription rates of thousands of genes through a few modes of regulation that recur across the genome. These modes interact with a changing cellular environment to yield highly dynamic expression patterns. In bacteria, the relationship between a gene’s regulatory architecture and its expression is well understood for individual model gene circuits. However, a broader perspective of these dynamics at the genome-scale is lacking, in part because bacterial transcriptomics have hitherto captured only a static snapshot of expression averaged across millions of cells. As a result, the full diversity of gene expression dynamics and their relation to regulatory architecture remains unknown. Here we present a novel genome-wide classification of regulatory modes based on each gene’s transcriptional response to its own replication, which we term the Transcription-Replication Interaction Profile (TRIP). We found that the response to the universal perturbation of chromosomal replication integrates biological regulatory factors with biophysical molecular events on the chromosome to reveal a gene’s local regulatory context. While the TRIPs of many genes conform to a gene dosage-dependent pattern, others diverge in distinct ways, including altered timing or amplitude of expression, and this is shaped by factors such as intra-operon position, repression state, or presence on mobile genetic elements. Our transcriptome analysis also simultaneously captures global properties, such as the rates of replication and transcription, as well as the nestedness of replication patterns. This work challenges previous notions of the drivers of expression heterogeneity within a population of cells, and unearths a previously unseen world of gene transcription dynamics.