title: Instability of inhibited replication forks in E. coli.
abstract: Inhibiting the progress of replication forks in E. coli makes them susceptible to breakage. Broken replication forks are evidently reassembled by the RecBCD recombinational repair pathway. These findings explain a particular pattern of DNA degradation during inhibition of chromosomal replication, the role of recombination in the viability of mutants with displaced replication origin, and hyper-recombination observed in the Terminus of the E. coli chromosome in rnh mutants. Breakage and repair of inhibited replication forks could be the reason for the recombination-dependence of inducible stable DNA replication. A mechanism by which RecABCD-dependent recombination between very short inverted repeats may help E. coli to invert an operon, transcribed in the direction opposite to that of DNA replication, is discussed.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Molecular Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene 97403, USA.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kuzminov
mesh_terms: D004261:DNA Replication; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000235:genetics*
chemical_list: D004269:DNA, Bacterial