Significance In bacteria, functionally related genes are often cotranscribed in a single mRNA molecule under the same upstream promoter, forming a polycistronic operon unit. With this strategy, bacteria guarantee that production of all proteins related to a specific cellular process is simultaneously switched on or off. Here, we report the identification of a transcriptional organization consisting in operons that contain a gene(s) that is transcribed in the opposite direction to the rest of the genes of the operon. As a consequence, the resulting mRNA is fully complementary to the operon transcript. This genetic arrangement leads to mutual regulation of the overlapping transcripts expression and, thus, provides an additional strategy for coordinating the expression of functionally related genes within an operon.