Greated A., Lambertsen L., Williams P.A. &
Thomas C.M. (2002) Complete sequence analysis of the IncP-9 TOL plasmid
pWW0 from Pseudomonas putida. Environmental Microbiology (in
press). See Abstract.
ABSTRACT
The TOL plasmid pWW0 (117kb) is the best studied catabolic plasmid and
the archetype of the IncP-9 plasmid incompatibility group from Pseudomonas.
It carries the degradative (xyl) genes for toluenes and xylenes
within catabolic transposons Tn4651 and Tn4653. Analysis
of the complete pWW0 nucleotide sequence revealed 148 putative open reading
frames. Of these, 77 showed similarity to published sequences in the available
databases predicting functions for: plasmid replication, stable amintenance
and transfer; phenotypic determinants; gene regulation and expression;
and transposition. All identifiable transposition functions lay within
the boundaries of the 70 kb transposon Tn4653, leaving a 46 kb sector
containing all the IncP-9 core functions. The replicon and stable inheritance
region was very similar to the mini-replicon from IncP-9 antibiotic resistance
plasmid pM3, with their Rep proteins forming a novel group of initiation
proteins. pWW0 transfer functions exist as two blocks encoding putative
DNA processing and mating pair formation genes, with organization and sequence
similarity to incW