title: Predicting knot or catenane type of site-specific recombination products.
abstract: Site-specific recombination on supercoiled circular DNA yields a variety of knotted or catenated products. Here, we present a topological model of this process and characterize all possible products of the most common substrates: unknots, unlinks, and torus knots and catenanes. This model tightly prescribes the knot or catenane type of previously uncharacterized data. We also discuss how the model helps to distinguish products of distributive recombination and, in some cases, determine the order of processive recombination products.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Center for Bioinformatics, Imperial College London, London, England SW7 2AZ, UK. d.buck@imperial.ac.uk
authors.forename: Dorothy
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Buck
authors.forename: Erica
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Flapan
mesh_terms: D004278:DNA, Superhelical / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000235:genetics; D008958:Models, Molecular; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D011995:Recombination, Genetic
chemical_list: D004278:DNA, Superhelical