On the interplay of gene positioning and the role of rho-independent terminators inEscherichia coli

Abstract
The majority of intrinsic rho‐independent terminator signals, reported to consist of stable hairpin structures followed by T‐rich regions, possess the potential to operate bi‐directionally and to induce transcription terminations on both strands of the DNA duplex in Escherichia coli. By using RNAMotif software, we investigated the distributions of termination motifs around the 3′‐ends of overlapping and non‐overlapping genes at the genomic level. We suggest that the positions of compactly encoded E. coli genes and rho‐independent terminators are optimized to terminate the adjoining genes on their antisense strands efficiently, and not to mis‐terminate overlapping transcripts, due to their bi‐directional properties.