Flip-flop around the origin and terminus of replication in prokaryotic genomes.docVIP

/2001/2/12/interactions/1004.1 Correspondence Flip-flop around the origin and terminus of replication in prokaryotic genomes Pawe3 Mackiewicz, Dorota Mackiewicz, Maria Kowalczuk and Stanis3aw Cebrat A response to Evidence for symmetric chromosomal inversions around the replication origin in bacteria by JA Eisen, J Heidelberg, O White and SL Salzberg, Genome Biology 2000, 1:research0011.1-0011.9. Address: Institute of Microbiology, Department of Genetics, Wroc3aw University, ul. Przybyszewskiego 63/77, 51-148 Wroc3aw, Poland. Correspondence: Stanis3aw Cebrat. E-mail: cebrat@microb.uni.wroc.pl Published: 15 November 2001 GenomeBiology 2001, 2(12):interactions1004.1–1004.4 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2001/2/12/interactions/1004 ? BioMed Central Ltd (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) The problem of rearrangements in the positions of replication forks. Their (plausible) theory is that replication forks are hot spots for recombination. Given that the two replication forks are at approximately the same distance from the origin (during the bi-direc- tional replication), translocations are symmetrical about the origin-terminus axis. Thus, according to Tillier and Collins [4], specific constraints on the mecha- nisms of recombination are responsible for the observed bias in the frequency of finding particular rearrangement prod- ucts. We argue that it is selection that may be mainly responsible for the observed bias, and the probability that optimal position of genes with respect to the distance from the origin of repli- cation [6,7]. As a result, as well as closely related prokaryotic genomes has been discussed several times recently [1-4]. A characteristic feature of these rearrangements is that many orthologs (genes coding for the same function in different genomes) stay at the same distance fro