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Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access first published online on August 6, 2008
This version published online on August 9, 2008
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkn500
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© 2008 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Molecular Biology

The RecU Holliday junction resolvase acts at early stages of homologous recombination

Cristina Cañas, Begoña Carrasco, Silvia Ayora* and Juan C. Alonso

Departmento de Biotecnología Microbiana, Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, CSIC, C/Darwin 3, Campus Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +34 915855450; Fax: +34 915854506; Email: sayora{at}cnb.csic.es

Received June 20, 2008. Revised July 18, 2008. Accepted July 18, 2008.

Homologous recombination is essential for DNA repair and generation of genetic diversity in all organisms. It occurs through a series of presynaptic steps where the substrate is presented to the recombinase (RecA in bacteria). Then, the recombinase nucleoprotein filament mediates synapsis by first promoting the formation of a D-loop and later of a Holliday junction (HJ) that is subsequently cleaved by the HJ resolvase. The coordination of the synaptic step with the late resolution step is poorly understood. Bacillus subtilis RecU catalyzes resolution of HJs, and biochemical evidence suggests that it might modulate RecA. We report here the isolation and characterization of two mutants of RecU (recU56 and recU71), which promote resolution of HJs, but do not promote RecA modulation. In vitro, the RecU mutant proteins (RecUK56A or RecUR71A) bind and cleave HJs and interact with RuvB. RecU interacts with RecA and inhibits its single-stranded DNA-dependent dATP hydrolysis, but RecUK56A and RecUR71A do not exert a negative effect on the RecA dATPase and fail to interact with it. Both activities are important in vivo since RecU mutants impaired only in RecA interaction are as sensitive to DNA damaging agents as a deletion mutant.


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