Link to Pubmed [PMID] – 12847524
Nat. Genet. 2003 Aug;34(4):377-8
Preferential positioning of bacterial genes in the leading strand was thought to result from selection to avoid high head-on collision rates between DNA and RNA polymerases. Here we show, however, that in Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli, essentiality (the transcript product), not expressiveness (the collision rate), selectively drives the biased gene distribution.