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Volume 162, Issue 1

Growth and sporulation defects in mutants with a single operon can be suppressed by amplification of the operon Free

Abstract

The genome of strain 168 encodes ten rRNA () operons. We previously reported that strains with only a single operon had a decreased growth and sporulation frequency. We report here the isolation and characterization of suppressor mutants from seven strains that each have a single operon ( or ). The suppressor mutants for strain RIK656 with a single operon had a higher frequency of larger colonies. These suppressor mutants had not only increased growth rates, but also increased sporulation frequencies and ribosome levels compared to the parental mutant strain RIK656. Quantitative PCR analyses showed that all these suppressor mutants had an increased number of copies of the operon. Suppressor mutants were also isolated from the six other strains with single operons ( or ). Next generation and capillary sequencing showed that all of the suppressor mutants had tandem repeats of the chromosomal locus containing the remaining operon (amplicon). These amplicons varied in size from approximately 9 to 179 kb. The amplifications were likely to be initiated by illegitimate recombination between non- or micro-homologous sequences, followed by unequal crossing-over during DNA replication. These results are consistent with our previous report that operon copy number has a major role in cellular processes such as cell growth and sporulation.

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© 2016 The Authors
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2016-01-01
2024-04-18
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Growth and sporulation defects in Bacillus subtilis mutants with a single rrn operon can be suppressed by amplification of the rrn operon
Microbiology 162, 35 (2016); https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.000207
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.000207
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.000207
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