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J. Bacteriol. doi:10.1128/JB.01232-06
Copyright (c) 2006, American Society for Microbiology and/or the Listed Authors/Institutions. All Rights Reserved.

A type Ib ParB protein involving in plasmid partitioning in a gram-positive bacterium

State Key Laboratory of Virology, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430072, and College of Life Sciences, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, Shandong 273165, China

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: taiyuanl{at}hotmail.com, yizhang{at}whu.edu.cn.

	Abstract

Our current understanding of segregation of prokaryotic plasmids has been mainly derived from the study of the gram-negative bacterial plasmids. We previously reported a replicon of the cryptic plasmid from a gram-positive bacterium, Leifsonia xyli subsp. cynodontis. The replicon contains a putative plasmid partition cassette including a walker-type ATPase followed by the open reading frame 4 without sequence homologue. Here we reported that the orf4 gene was essential for maintaining the plasmid stability in L. xyli subsp. cynodontis. Furthermore, the purified ORF4 protein specifically and cooperatively bound to direct repeated sequences located upstream of the parA gene in vitro, indicating that orf4 is a parB gene and the direct repeated DNA sequences constitute a partition site, parS. The location of parS and the features of ParA and ParB proteins suggest that this plasmid partition cassette belongs to type Ib, representing the first type Ib cassette identified from a gram-positive bacterial plasmid.

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