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The Toxin-Antitoxin System of the Streptococcal Plasmid pSM19035

Urszula Zielenkiewicz^* and Piotr Cegowski

Department of Microbial Biochemistry, Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 02-106 Warsaw, Poland

Received 22 November 2004/ Accepted 6 June 2005

pSM19035 of the pathogenic bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes is a low-copy-number plasmid carrying erythromycin resistance, stably maintained in a broad range of gram-positive bacteria. We show here that the -- operon of this plasmid constitutes a novel proteic plasmid addiction system in which the and genes encode an antitoxin and toxin, respectively, while plays an autoregulatory function. Expression of toxin Zeta is bactericidal for the gram-positive Bacillus subtilis and bacteriostatic for the gram-negative Escherichia coli. The toxic effects of gene expression in both bacterial species are counteracted by proper expression of . The - toxin-antitoxin cassette stabilizes plasmids in E. coli less efficiently than in B. subtilis.

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