Transcription is often portrayed as a continuous, unbroken process: DNA -> mRNA. However, recent advances in imaging and laboratory techniques have revealed that this is not the case. Transcription is far noisier and more complex than this simple schema suggests. Polymerases pause, backtrack, block one another and can interfere with the replication machinery.
This talk will present some of our recent work on transcriptional dynamics using a new data type, nascent elongating transcript sequencing. I'll also introduce YonO, a single subunit DNA-dependent RNA polymerase which we have recently identified in B. subtilis.