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Journal of Bacteriology, April 2000, p. 1889-1894, Vol. 182, No. 7
0021-9193/00/$04.00+0
Copyright © 2000, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.

pTAR-Encoded Proteins in Plasmid Partitioning

Kirill Kalnin,dagger Svetlana Stegalkina,Dagger and Michael Yarmolinsky*

Laboratory of Biochemistry, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-4255

Received 20 September 1999/Accepted 7 January 2000

Partition cassettes, essential for the segregational stability of low-copy-number bacterial plasmids, typically encode two autoregulated proteins and an adjacent cis-acting centromere analog to which one or perhaps both proteins bind. The diminutive partition region of pTAR of Agrobacterium spp. was reported to be exceptional, encoding only a single protein, ParA (D. R. Gallie and C. I. Kado, J. Mol. Biol. 193:465-478, 1987). However, resequencing of the region revealed two small downstream genes, parB and orf-84, of which only parB was found to be essential for partitioning in A. tumefaciens. Purified ParA exhibited a weak ATPase activity that was modestly increased by nonspecific DNA. ParB bound in vitro to repeated sequences present in a region, parS, that possesses centromere and operator functions and within which we identified the primary transcription start site by primer extension. In certain respects the Par proteins behave normally in the foreign host Escherichia coli. In E. coli, as in A. tumefaciens, ParB repressed the partition operon; ParA, inactive alone, augmented this repression. Functional similarities between the partition system of pTAR and those of other plasmids and bacteria are prominent, despite differences in size, organization, and amino acid sequence.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Laboratory of Biochemistry, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, 37 Convent Dr., Bethesda, MD 20892-4255. Phone: (301) 496-5226. Fax: (301) 402-3095. E-mail: myarmo{at}helix.nih.gov.

dagger Present address: Oral Infection and Immunity Branch, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892.

Dagger Present address: Laboratory of Genetics and Physiology, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892.

Journal of Bacteriology, April 2000, p. 1889-1894, Vol. 182, No. 7
0021-9193/00/$04.00+0
Copyright © 2000, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.


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