Bacteria have evolved a number of ways for a coping with stress and adapting to changing environmental conditions. A family of bacterial proteins which contain a functional cold shock domain involves highly conserved compounds. They bind nucleic acids and modulate transcription and posttranscriptional events in bacteria. The cold shock proteins have been shown to regulate the expression of various genes that are involved in virulence and resistance of many bacteria to stress. This review discusses new data on the actions and role of the cold shock proteins in the regulation of expression in intracellular bacterial pathogens.