Identification of a Sex-factor-affinity Site in E. coli as

Abstract

Many conjugative bacterial plasmids are capable of promoting the conjugal transfer of normally physically unlinked replicons, including the main bacterial chromosome (for review, see Holloway 1979). Such behavior has been termed mobilization (Novick et al. 1976) or conduction (Clark and Adelberg 1962; Clark and Warren 1979). One model proposed to describe at least some such interactions involves recombination between regions of extensive nucleotide sequence homology on both the conjugative and nonconjugative replicons (Clark and Warren 1979). Such recombination-mediated processes occur in the cases of some experimentally altered plasmids (Wilkins 1969; Kleckner et al. 1977; Barth 1979).