The bacterium Myxococcus xanthus provides an important multicellular model for understanding stress responses. The regulatory proteins CsgA, FruA, and MrpC are essential to survive prolonged starvation by forming fruiting bodies, which are mounds containing hardy round spores formed from vegetative rods, but the genome-wide pathways affected by these proteins remain poorly understood. Only a fruA mutant transcriptome and MrpC ChIP-seq have been reported. We describe RNA-seq transcriptome analysis of csgA, fruA, and mrpC mutants relative to a wild-type laboratory strain midway during the starvation-induced developmental process, when mounds, but not spores, have formed. The primary goal is to identify processes which are regulated by one or more of these genes during development.
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