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Physical characterisation of the “Rac prophage” in E. coli K12

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Summary

We confirm the hypothesis of Low (1973) that many E. coli K 12 strains contain a prophage (the Rac prophage) located a few minutes clockwise of the trp operon on the genetic map. We have used restriction endonucleases and 32P-labelled probes to construct a physical map of this prophage. Some E. coli K 12 strains, including AB1157, have lost the entire prophage, apparently by a specific deletion. This is consistent with prophage excision by site-specific recombination.

λ reverse (λrev) phages (Zissler et al., 1971) are recombination proficient derivatives of phage λ in which the phage recombination functions have been replaced by analogous functions (RecE) derived from the host chromosome (Gottesman et al., 1974; Gillen et al., 1977). Our data support the origin of λrev phages by recombination between λ and the Rac prophage following excision of the Rac prophage from the E. coli chromosome.

Important experimental data are included in the Figure legends.

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  1. Department of Molecular Biology, University of Edinburgh, Kings Buildings, EH9 3JR, Edinburgh, Scotland

    Kim Kaiser & Noreen E. Murray

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  1. Kim Kaiser
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  2. Noreen E. Murray
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Communicated by W. Arber

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Kaiser, K., Murray, N.E. Physical characterisation of the “Rac prophage” in E. coli K12. Molec. Gen. Genet. 175, 159–174 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00425532

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