###### Abstract  
The coordination of bacterial genomic transcription involves an intricate network of interdependent genes encoding nucleoid-associated proteins (NAPs), DNA topoisomerases, RNA polymerase subunits and modulators of transcription machinery. The central element of this homeostatic regulatory system, integrating the information on cellular physiological state and producing a corresponding transcriptional response, is the multi-subunit RNA polymerase (RNAP) holoenzyme. In this review article, we argue that recent observations revealing DNA topoisomerases and metabolic enzymes associated with RNAP supramolecular complex support the notion of structural coupling between transcription machinery, DNA topology and cellular metabolism as a fundamental device coordinating the spatiotemporal genomic transcription. We analyse the impacts of various combinations of RNAP holoenzymes and global transcriptional regulators such as abundant NAPs, on genomic transcription from this viewpoint, monitoring the spatiotemporal patterns of couploms--overlapping subsets of the regulons of NAPs and RNAP sigma factors. We show that the temporal expression of regulons is by and large, correlated with that of cognate regulatory genes, whereas both the spatial organization and temporal expression of couplons is distinctly impacted by the regulons of NAPs and sigma factors. We propose that the coordination of the growth phase-dependent concentration gradients of global regulators with chromosome configurational dynamics determines the spatiotemporal patterns of genomic expression. binding sites thereby affecting the activity of individual genes/operons by switching them on or off [3]. This interconversion of analog and digital information makes the system organizationally closed, that is, the information flow in the system is circular. The type of genetic control mediated via transcription factors that bind specific, high affinity DNA sites has been dubbed digital control [5,7]. Digital control can be assessed in \"effective\" (i.e., growth condition-specific) transcript profiles using the electronically compiled transcriptional regulatory network (TRN) as a reference [8]. However, the TRN comprises only a part of communications within the genetic regulation system, namely those between the DNA binding transcription factors (TFs) and their target genes (TGs), which even in the best-studied bacterial model organism _E. coli_ comprise only about one third of total genes, while the rest is not known to be under the control of TFs [9]. Interestingly, some bacterial endosymbionts seem to lack the TFs almost entirely [10]. Furthermore, certain transcription processes cannot be readily accounted for on the basis of TF-TG interactions, as for example, the widespread transcriptional read-through by RNAP and production of long transcripts extending across adjacent operons as well as the local, gene orientation-dependent transcriptional effects [11,12]. The nature of the regulation of the genes that are not part of the TRN remained uncertain until the development of high-throughput approaches, which discovered distinct genome-wide patterns of transcriptional responses to changes of the chromosomal DNA topology induced by DNA topoisomerase inhibitors and environmental stress [13, 14, 15, 16, 17]. Accordingly, this latter type of genetic control, mediated by a continuous variable--namely, the concerted alterations of DNA superhelical density and composition of abundant chromatin architectural proteins--was dubbed analog control. Importantly, the digital and analog control types were found to counterbalance each other that is, one type can compensate for the deficiency in the other [5]. While the connection between the changes of DNA topology and cellular metabolism has been well documented in earlier studies [18, 19, 20], recent studies strongly suggest that analog control via DNA topology provides the main mechanism sustaining the metabolic coherence ([21]; but see also [22]).