Spatial and functional organization
of bacterial genomes

During recent years, the main structural layers of bacterial genomes and their key organizing factors have begun to emerge. Building on this progress, we now need to understand how genome architecture influences the acquisition and maintenance of foreign DNA, and how it adapts to different bacterial lifestyles such as metabolic differentiation, dormancy, virulence, or biofilm formation. Furthermore, the impact of chromatin modulation and chromosome folding on bacterial transcriptional programs and other cellular processes remains largely unexplored.