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Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on December 7, 2006
Nucleic Acids Research 2007 35(1):214-222; doi:10.1093/nar/gkl1072
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, Vol. 35, No. 1 214-222
© 2006 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.

RNA

Dispersion of the RmInt1 group II intron in the Sinorhizobium meliloti genome upon acquisition by conjugative transfer

Rafael Nisa-Martínez, José I. Jiménez-Zurdo, Francisco Martínez-Abarca, Estefanía Muñoz-Adelantado and Nicolás Toro*

Grupo de Ecología Genética de la Rizosfera, Estación Experimental del Zaidín Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Profesor Albareda 1, 18008 Granada, Spain

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +3 495 818 1600; Fax: +3 495 812 9600; Email: ntoro{at}eez.csic.es

Received September 8, 2006. Revised October 23, 2006. Accepted November 9, 2006.

RmInt1 is a self-splicing and mobile group II intron initially identified in the bacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti, which encodes a reverse transcriptase–maturase (Intron Encoded Protein, IEP) lacking the C-terminal DNA binding (D) and DNA endonuclease domains (En). RmInt1 invades cognate intronless homing sites (ISRm2011-2) by a mechanism known as retrohoming. This work describes how the RmInt1 intron spreads in the S.meliloti genome upon acquisition by conjugation. This process was revealed by using the wild-type intron RmInt1 and engineered intron-donor constructs based on ribozyme coding sequence ({Delta}ORF)-derivatives with higher homing efficiency than the wild-type intron. The data demonstrate that RmInt1 propagates into the S.meliloti genome primarily by retrohoming with a strand bias related to replication of the chromosome and symbiotic megaplasmids. Moreover, we show that when expressed in trans from a separate plasmid, the IEP is able to mobilize genomic {Delta}ORF ribozymes that afterward displayed wild-type levels of retrohoming. Our results contribute to get further understanding of how group II introns spread into bacterial genomes in nature.

Present address: Estefanía Muñoz-Adelantado, Centre de Regulació Genòmica, 08003 Barcelona, Spain


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