GENETIC EXCHANGE IN SALMONELLA

Abstract

Genetic investigations with many different bacteria have revealed parallelisms and some contrasts with the biology of higher forms. The successful application of selective enrichment techniques to the study of gene recombination in Escherichia coli (Tatum and Lederberg, 1947; Lederberg et al., 1951) suggestred that a similar approach should be applied to other bacteria. This paper presents the results of such experiments with Salmonella typhimurium a.nd other Salmonella serot,ypes. The mechanism of genetic exchange found in these experiments differs from sexual recombination in E. coli in many respect’s so as t,o warrant a new descriptive term, transduction.