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Journal of Bacteriology, August 2005, p. 5437-5451, Vol. 187, No. 15
0021-9193/05/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JB.187.15.5437-5451.2005
Copyright © 2005, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Unusual Group II Introns in Bacteria of the Bacillus cereus Group{dagger}

Nicolas J. Tourasse, Fredrik B. Stabell, Lillian Reiter, and Anne-Brit Kolstø*

The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo and School of Pharmacy, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Received 17 January 2005/ Accepted 12 April 2005

A combination of sequence and structure analysis and reverse transcriptase PCR experiments was used to characterize the group II introns in the complete genomes of two strains of the pathogen Bacillus cereus. While B. cereus ATCC 14579 harbors a single intron element in the chromosome, B. cereus ATCC 10987 contains three introns in the chromosome and four in its 208-kb pBc10987plasmid. The most striking finding is the presence in B. cereus ATCC 10987 of an intron [B.c.I2(a)] located on the reverse strand of a gene encoding a putative cell surface protein which appears to be correlated to strains of clinical origin. Because of the opposite orientation of B.c.I2(a), the gene is disrupted. Even more striking is that B.c.I2(a) splices out of an RNA transcript corresponding to the opposite DNA strand. All other intragenic introns studied here are inserted in the same orientation as their host genes and splice out of the mRNA in vivo, setting the flanking exons in frame. Noticeably, B.c.I3 in B. cereus ATCC 10987 represents the first example of a group II intron entirely included within a conserved replication gene, namely, the {alpha} subunit of DNA polymerase III. Another striking finding is that the observed 3' splice site of B.c.I4 occurs 56 bp after the predicted end of the intron. This apparently unusual splicing mechanism may be related to structural irregularities in the 3' terminus. Finally, we also show that the intergenic introns of B. cereus ATCC 10987 are transcribed with their upstream genes and do splice in vivo.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: School of Pharmacy, University of Oslo, PB 1068 Blindern, 0316 Oslo, Norway. Phone: (47) 22 85 63 77. Fax: (47) 22 85 44 42. E-mail: a.b.kolsto{at}admin.uio.no.

{dagger} Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://jb.asm.org/.

Journal of Bacteriology, August 2005, p. 5437-5451, Vol. 187, No. 15
0021-9193/05/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JB.187.15.5437-5451.2005
Copyright © 2005, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.



This article has been cited by other articles:

  • Stabell, F. B., Tourasse, N. J., Kolsto, A.-B. (2009). A conserved 3' extension in unusual group II introns is important for efficient second-step splicing. Nucleic Acids Res 37: 3202-3214 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
  • Simon, D. M., Clarke, N. A.C., McNeil, B. A., Johnson, I., Pantuso, D., Dai, L., Chai, D., Zimmerly, S. (2008). Group II introns in Eubacteria and Archaea: ORF-less introns and new varieties. RNA 14: 1704-1713 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
  • Tourasse, N. J., Kolsto, A.-B. (2008). Survey of group I and group II introns in 29 sequenced genomes of the Bacillus cereus group: insights into their spread and evolution. Nucleic Acids Res 36: 4529-4548 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
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