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research-article

High information conservation implies that at least three proteins bind independently to F plasmid incD repeats.

Laboratory of Mathematical Biology, National Cancer Institute, Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center, Maryland 21702-1201.

ABSTRACT

The 12 incD repeats in the F plasmid each contain about 60 bits of information, which is three times the amount of conservation that a single protein would need to distinguish the repeats from the rest of the Escherichia coli genome. This is the first reported discovery of a case of threefold excess information, and it implies that at least three proteins bind independently to the repeats. In support of this observation, other workers have shown that three polypeptides bind to this region, but only one, SopB, is known to bind independently of other factors. Identification of the other two proteins should help us to understand the mechanism of plasmid partitioning during cell division.

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Schneider, T. D. (2001). Strong minor groove base conservation in sequence logos implies DNA distortion or base flipping during replication and transcription initiation. Nucleic Acids Res 29: 4881-4891 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
• Schneider, T. D. (2000). Evolution of biological information. Nucleic Acids Res 28: 2794-2799 [Abstract] [Full Text]