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Tn 5053 family transposons are res site hunters sensing plasmidal res sites occupied by cognate resolvases
Author(s) -
Minakhina S.,
Kholodii G.,
Mindlin S.,
Yurieva O.,
Nikiforov V.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
molecular microbiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.857
H-Index - 247
eISSN - 1365-2958
pISSN - 0950-382X
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-2958.1999.01548.x
Subject(s) - transposable element , tn3 transposon , biology , transposition (logic) , plasmid , site specific recombination , genetics , gene , transposase , inverted repeat , dna , recombination , genome , recombinase , linguistics , philosophy
DNA sequence database search revealed that most of Tn 5053 /Tn 402 family transposons inserted into natural plasmids were located in putative res regions upstream of genes encoding various resolvase‐like proteins. Some of these resolvase genes belonged to Tn 3 family transposons and were closely related to the tnpR genes of Tn 1721 and a recently detected Tn 5044 . Using recombinant plasmids containing fragments of Tn 1721 or Tn 5044 as targets in transposition experiments, we have demonstrated that Tn 5053 displays striking insertional preference for the res regions of these transposons: more than 70% of Tn 5053 insertion events occur in clusters inside the target res regions, while most remaining insertion events occur no further than 200 base pairs away from both sides of the res regions. We demonstrate that Tn 5053 insertions (both into and outside a res region of the target plasmid) require the presence of a functional cognate resolvase gene either in cis or in trans . To our knowledge, this is the first case when a site‐specific recombination system outside a transposon has been shown to be involved in transposition.