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Bacterial recombination is a type of genetic recombination in bacteria characterized by DNA transfer from one organism called donor to another organism as recipient. This process occurs in three main ways:
Some DNA viruses encode a recombinase that facilitates homologous recombination. A well-studied example is the UvsX recombinase encoded by bacteriophage T4. [10] UvsX is homologous to bacterial RecA. UvsX, like RecA, can facilitate the assimilation of linear single-stranded DNA into an homologous DNA duplex to produce a D-loop.
The enzyme complex is composed of three different subunits called RecB, RecC, and RecD and hence the complex is named RecBCD (Figure 1). Before the discovery of the recD gene, [4] the enzyme was known as “RecBC.”
Bacterial conjugation has been extensively studied in Escherichia coli, but also occurs in other bacteria such as Mycobacterium smegmatis. Conjugation requires stable and extended contact between a donor and a recipient strain, is DNase resistant, and the transferred DNA is incorporated into the recipient chromosome by homologous recombination.
In genetic engineering, recombination can also refer to artificial and deliberate recombination of disparate pieces of DNA, often from different organisms, creating what is called recombinant DNA. A prime example of such a use of genetic recombination is gene targeting , which can be used to add, delete or otherwise change an organism's genes.
It repairs breaks that occur on only one of DNA's two strands, known as single-strand gaps. The RecF pathway can also repair double-strand breaks in DNA when the RecBCD pathway, another pathway of homologous recombination in bacteria, is inactivated by mutations. [1] Like the RecBCD pathway, the RecF pathway requires RecA for strand invasion.
In this case the recombination sites are slightly asymmetric, which allows the enzyme to tell apart the left and right ends of the site. When generating products, left ends are always joined to the right ends of their partner sites, and vice versa. This causes different recombination hybrid sites to be reconstituted in the recombination products.
A bacterial chromosome contains a single origin, and therefore the whole bacterial chromosome is a replicon. The chromosomes of archaea and eukaryotes can have multiple origins of replication, and so their chromosomes may consist of several replicons [citation needed].