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Journal of Bacteriology, August 1998, p. 4102-4110, Vol. 180, No. 16
0021-9193/98/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1998, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Rhs Elements Comprise Three Subfamilies
Which Diverged Prior to Acquisition by Escherichia
coli
Yong-Dong
Wang,
Sheng
Zhao,
and
Charles W.
Hill*
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biology, Pennsylvania State College of Medicine, Hershey,
Pennsylvania 17033
Received 28 January 1998/Accepted 2 June 1998
The Rhs elements are complex genetic composites widely
spread among Escherichia coli isolates. One of their
components, a 3.7-kb, GC-rich core, maintains a single open reading
frame that extends the full length of the core and then 400 to 600 bp
beyond into an AT-rich region. Whereas Rhs cores are
homologous, core extensions from different elements are dissimilar. Two
new Rhs elements from strains of the ECOR reference
collection have been characterized. RhsG (from strain
ECOR-11) maps to min 5.3, and RhsH (from strain ECOR-45)
maps to min 32.8, where it lies in tandem with RhsE.
Comparison of strain K-12 to ECOR-11 indicates that RhsG
was once present in but has been largely deleted from an ancestor of
K-12. Phylogenetic analysis shows that the cores from eight known
elements fall into three subfamilies, RhsA-B-C-F, RhsD-E, and RhsG-H. Cores from different
subfamilies diverge 22 to 29%. Analysis of substitutions that
distinguish between subfamilies shows that the origin of the ancestral
core as well as the process of subfamily separation occurred in a
GC-rich background. Furthermore, each subfamily independently passed
from the GC-rich background to a less GC-rich background such as
E. coli. A new example of core-extension shuffling provides
the first example of exchange between cores of different subfamilies. A
novel component of RhsE and RhsG,
vgr, encodes a large protein distinguished by 18 to 19 repetitions of a Val-Gly dipeptide occurring with a eight-residue periodicity.
*
Corresponding author. Department of Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania State College of Medicine, Mail
Services H171, Hershey, PA 17033-0850. Phone: (717) 531-8592. Fax:
(717) 531-7072. E-mail: chill{at}psu.edu.

Present address: Department of Biomathematics, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030.
Journal of Bacteriology, August 1998, p. 4102-4110, Vol. 180, No. 16
0021-9193/98/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1998, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
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