Article
- The EMBO Journal (2001) 20, 3229 - 3237
- doi:10.1093/emboj/20.12.3229
Telomere resolution in the Lyme disease spirochete
George Chaconas1,2,3, Philip E. Stewart2, Kit Tilly2, James L. Bono2 and Patricia Rosa2
- Department of Biochemistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C1, Canada
- Laboratory of Human Bacterial Pathogenesis, Rocky Mountain Laboratories, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, National Institutes of Health, Hamilton, MT 59840, USA
- Department of Biochemistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C1, Canada
Correspondence to:
George Chaconas, E-mail: chaconas@uwo.ca
Received 12 March 2001; Accepted 18 April 2001; Revised 18 April 2001
Abstract
The genus Borrelia includes the causative agents of Lyme disease and relapsing fever. An unusual feature of these bacteria is a genome that includes linear DNA molecules with covalently closed hairpin ends referred to as telomeres. We have investigated the mechanism by which the hairpin telomeres are processed during replication. A synthetic 140 bp sequence having the predicted structure of a replicated telomere was shown to function as a viable substrate for telomere resolution in vivo, and was sufficient to convert a circular replicon to a linear form. Our results suggest that the final step in the replication of linear Borrelia replicons is a site-specific DNA breakage and reunion event to regenerate covalently closed hairpin ends. The telomere substrate described here will be valuable both for in vivo manipulation of linear DNA in Borrelia and for in vitro studies to identify and characterize the telomere resolvase.
Keywords:
- Borrelia,
- DNA replication,
- hairpin DNA,
- linear DNA,
- telomere resolution
