We used in-house perl scripts to extract novel expressed intergenic regions to identify novel small RNAs, riboswitches, and putative novel proteins. sRNA ,70 bp in length were discarded to minimize the number of false positives. For each novel expressed region, BLAST sequence searches were performed against the non-redundant protein database at NCBI to identify potential protein coding regions. Intergenic regions within predicted operons [24] represent expressed regions and can be mis-classified as sRNAs. Therefore, these regions were excluded.