Sharma et. al describe a strategy to identify small RNAs that effect bacterial gene regulation, much like siRNA in mammalian systems. The authors write: "We anticipate that the artificial sRNAs will be useful for dynamic control and fine-tuning of endogenous gene expression in bacteria for applications in synthetic biology."
This could definitely save time when testing perturbations in bacterial metabolism to synthesize new products, enabling testing of hypotheses before the need for genome manipulation.
Read the abstract (or article if you have access) here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/sb200001q
