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Journal of Bacteriology, May 2004, p. 2900-2905, Vol. 186, No. 9
0021-9193/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JB.186.9.2900-2905.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Polymerases Leave Fingerprints: Analysis of the Mutational Spectrum in Escherichia coli rpoB To Assess the Role of Polymerase IV in Spontaneous Mutation
Erika Wolff, Mandy Kim, Kaibin Hu, Hanjing Yang, and Jeffrey H. Miller*
Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics and the Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095
Received 21 October 2003/
Accepted 6 January 2004

ABSTRACT
We compared the distribution of mutations in
rpoB that lead
to rifampin resistance in strains with differing levels of polymerase
IV (Pol IV), including strains with deletions of the Pol IV-encoding
dinB gene, strains with a chromosomal copy of
dinB, strains
with the F'128 plasmid, and strains with plasmid amplification
of either the
dinB operon (
dinB-yafNOP) or the
dinB gene alone.
This analysis identifies several hot spots specific to Pol IV
which are virtually absent from the normal spontaneous spectrum,
indicating that Pol IV does not contribute significantly to
mutations occurring during exponential growth in liquid culture.

INTRODUCTION
Damage-inducible polymerases (
20,
22; for reviews, see references
9 and
16), such as the SOS-induced polymerase IV (Pol IV) and
Pol V in
Escherichia coli, not only bypass certain noncoding
lesions but also increase replication errors across from normal
bases (
19,
20,
23). Their discovery has led to the suggestion
that a significant fraction of spontaneous mutations in growing
cells under normal conditions might be due to errors caused
by basal levels of error-prone polymerases (
18). The
dinB-encoded
Pol IV is the leading candidate, since the overexpression of
dinB on high-copy plasmids leads to increases in base substitutions
and frameshifts, particularly 1 frameshifts (
11,
12,
23). Moreover, several studies have shown an approximately twofold
decrease in spontaneous mutations in strains with an inactivating
allele of
dinB that also reduces the expression of three genes
downstream of
dinB-
yafNOP (
14,
18), although this effect is
not present if only
dinB is inactivated (
14). The expression
of
dinB and
yafNOP is increased after SOS induction by DNA-damaging
agents (
4), and these four genes have been shown to be part
of an operon (
14).
We decided to examine the spectra of base substitution mutations in strains with differing levels of dinB expression, since a comparison of detailed genetic fingerprints of these strains might reveal patterns specific to processes involving and not involving Pol IV. We recently characterized a system using mutations in the rpoB gene that yield the rifampin resistance (Rifr) phenotype at 37°C in order to analyze the base substitution profiles of mutagens and mutators (10). We have now characterized 77 mutations in rpoB. Each of the six base substitutions is monitored with a set of 9 to 17 sites. In the study reported here, we looked at cells that carry a single copy of the dinB operon on the chromosome and compared the mutational spectrum of these cells with those of strains with deletions of the dinB gene, strains that carry a second copy of the dinB operon on an F' plasmid, and strains that carry a multicopy plasmid with an insert containing the dinB operon in one case and just the dinB gene in another case. We showed that some mutational hot spots are specific for the overexpression of the dinB operon and that others are found in the spectrum of wild-type strains but not after the amplification of the dinB operon. A comparison of the different spectra leads us to conclude that spontaneous mutations occurring during exponential growth in the absence of SOS induction or a dinB-overexpressing plasmid do not contain a significant contribution from dinB-Pol IV-induced mutations.
Table 1 shows the strains used in this work. We examined the frequencies of Rifr mutants that result from mutations in rpoB in strains P90C, CC107, EW90, EW99, EW100, and EW101. EW90 carries a deletion of dinB (1) that is nonpolar for the expression of the other genes in the dinB operon, and CC107 (5) is a derivative of P90C (15) that has an F'128 with a mutated lac operon, proAB, and the dinB operon (11). The expression of dinB from the F' plasmid has been reported to be three times higher than that from the chromosome (11), so CC107 would have four times the dinB level of P90C. EW100 is a CC107 derivative carrying a multicopy plasmid that overexpresses the dinB operon, and EW101 is the same as EW100 except that the plasmid insert contains only the dinB gene. EW99 carries the plasmid without any insert. We did not detect any difference in mutation frequencies among CC107, P90C, or EW90, as shown in Table 2. EW100 and EW101 have six- to sevenfold higher Rifr frequencies than the EW99 control (Table 2).
We analyzed mutations by direct DNA sequencing (for the methods
used, see reference
10) and in a number of cases supplemented
the sequence analysis with oligonucleotide hybridization (
3,
17). In the these cases, colonies were spotted onto LB Omnitrays
(Nunc, Rochester, N.Y.), grown overnight at 37°C, and transferred
to nylon membranes (Hybond N) from Amersham (Piscataway, N.J.).
The membranes were placed in denaturing solution (1.5 M NaCl,
0.5 M NaOH) for 7 min and then in neutralizing solution (1.5
M NaCl, 0.5 M Tris-HCl [pH 7.2], 0.001 M EDTA) for 6 min. The
membranes were baked at 80°C for 2 h and prehybridized (5
x SSPE [1
x SSPE is 0.18 M NaCl, 10 mM NaH
2PO
4, and 1 mM EDTA {pH
7.7}], 0.5% sodium dodecyl sulfate [SDS], 5
x Denhardt's solution,
100 µg of herring sperm DNA/ml) during shaking at 47°C
for 1 h.
32P-end-labeled probes (5 pmol of oligonucleotide strand,
10 U of T4 polynucleotide kinase, 5
x T4 polynucleotide kinase
buffer, 10 µCi of [

-
32P]ATP/µl) were denatured at
100°C for 5 min, and 1 µl was added to hybridization
solutions for each oligonucleotide tested. Following hybridization
overnight at 47°C, membranes were washed twice in 2
x SSPE-0.1%
SDS at room temperature for 10 min, once in 1
x SSPE-0.1% SDS
at 47°C for 15 min, and once in 0.1
x SSPE-0.1% SDS at 47°C
for 10 min. Autoradiography was carried out with a phosphorimaging
screen.
The oligonucleotides were complementary to the mutant and wild-type sequences at the following base mutation sites in E. coli (corresponding base pair mutations from the wild type to the mutant are indicated in boldface type): 437 (T
G), 5'-GTGTTATCGTTTCCCAGCT-3'; 443 (A
T), 5'-ATCGTTTCCCAGCTGCA-3'; 1534 (T
C), 5'-GCCAGCTGTCTCAGTTTAT-3'; 1538 (A
T), 5'-AGCTGTCTCAGTTTATGGA-3'; 1546 (G
A), 5'-TCAGTTTATGGACCAGAA-3'; 1547 (A
G), 5'-GTTTATGGACCAGAACAAC-3'; 1576 (C
A), 5'-CTGAGATTACGCACAAACG-3'; 1576 (C
T), 5'-TGAGATTACGCACAAACG-3'; 1714 (A
C), 5'-TCGGTCTGATCAACTCTCT-3'; 1721 (C
T), 5'-TGATCAACTCTCTGTCCGT-3'.
Table 3 shows the sequence results for 1,057 mutations in rpoB from the strains described above, as well as from EM90 and EC90, mutS (mismatch repair-deficient) derivatives of P90C and EW90, respectively. We can make several comparisons on the basis of Table 3. The sites that are most prominent in the two wild-type spectra, those of CC107 and P90C (with and without F'128, respectively), are well represented in the spectrum of EW90 (which has a deletion of dinB). (Note that the CC107 sample is twice the size of both the P90C and the EW90 samples.) For example, the five most frequent changes in the wild-type (CC107 and P90C) samples are AT
GC at sites 1547 and 1534, GC
AT at site 1576, AT
TA at site 443, and AT
CG at site 1714. The first four of these changes are also prominent in the spectrum of EW90 (which has a deletion of dinB), and the fifth one (AT
CG at site 1714) is still represented in EW90. Therefore, the polymerases operating in the absence of Pol IV are capable of producing the hot spots seen in the wild-type spectra. Only the GC
AT transition at site 1576 is lacking in prominence in the spectrum of P90C (the wild type without the F'128), but this mutation is also very prominent in EW90, the dinB deletion derivative of P90C. Moreover, the distributions of mutations in a mutS background, lacking mismatch repair, are very similar in strains with and without the dinB deletion (Table 3).
We can also compare the mutational profiles of strains CC107,
P90C, and EW90 with that of EW100, the strain carrying p
dinB-yafNOP and yielding an elevated level of
rpoB mutations (Table
2).
(It should be noted that the distribution of mutations in CC107
containing the plasmid without an insert [EW99; data not shown]
is the same as that for CC107 alone.) A comparison of CC107
and EW100 (with the same sample size of approximately 300 mutations
each) shows that although there are marked similarities with
regard to some of the hot spots, there are also several clear
differences. Most notably, the GC

TA transversion at site 1576
is the most prominent change for EW100 with 62 occurrences,
compared with 4 occurrences for CC107. The other transversion
at this site, GC

CG, is also more prominent in EW100 than in
CC107. In addition, the AT

CG transversion at position 437 is
represented by 17 occurrences in the EW100 sample, but it is
absent from the spectra of CC107 and P90C (with a sample size
of 146). Thus, there are three hot spots present in the Pol
IV-overproducing strain (EW100) that are essentially absent
from the wild-type (CC107) strain. On the other hand, the AT

TA
transversion at 443 appears to occur frequently in all of the
strains that lack the Pol IV-overexpressing plasmid but not
in the strain (EW100) with the overexpressing plasmid (38 occurrences
in CC107 versus 4 occurrences in EW100 for the same sample size).
Figure 1 displays the data from Table 3 by position so that different base substitutions at the same site can be visualized together while the mutation type can still be distinguished. It can be seen that position 1576 is the most prominent hot spot in the EW100 (pdinB-yafNOP) spectrum, with the total number of mutations there accounting for 30% of all the base substitutions in the EW100 profile. In contrast to the predominance of GC
TA and GC
CG transversions at site 1576 in the pdinB-yafNOP (EW100) spectrum, mutations at this site in the wild-type (CC107) spectrum are mostly GC
AT transitions. Although there are many similarities between these two spectra, they clearly differ at positions 437 and 443, in addition to the pronounced difference in transversions at 1576. We also found no difference in the distributions of mutations in EW100 (carrying pdinB-yafNOP) and EW101 (carrying pdinB) (Fig. 2).
Taken together, the data in Table
3 and Fig.
1 and
2 argue that
spontaneous base substitutions in wild-type strains such as
P90C and CC107 do not contain significant contributions from
the
dinB-encoded Pol IV or products of the other
dinB operon
genes (
yafNOP). The underrepresentation of the prominent hot
spots in
rpoB that are specific to the p
dinB-yafNOP-containing
strain (EW100) in the spectrum of mutations from CC107 allows
us to place an upper limit on the contribution from Pol IV and
putative products of the
yafNOP genes at no more than 10%. The
data also indicate that there is no difference in the base substitution
mutational spectra of strains with and without the F'128 plasmid,
even though there is a fourfold difference in Pol IV levels.
It should be noted that all of these determinations are for
mutations occurring in growing cells. For adaptive mutations
occurring in the stationary phase (
2,
8), a requirement for
Pol IV has been reported (
13,
21).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Roger Woodgate and Pat Foster for bacterial strains.
J.H.M. was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (grant no. ES0110875).

FOOTNOTES
* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles, 609 Charles E. Young #1602, Los Angeles, CA 90095. Phone: (310) 825-8460. Fax: (310) 206-3088. E-mail:
jhmiller{at}mbi.ucla.edu.


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Journal of Bacteriology, May 2004, p. 2900-2905, Vol. 186, No. 9
0021-9193/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JB.186.9.2900-2905.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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