Fig. 3.

Correlation between varying the level of MutL protein and the efficacy of recombination between diverged DNA sequences. (A) RecA-dependent recombination between 4% diverged lacZ repeats (R² = 0.79). (B) RecA-dependent conjugational recombination between Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium Hfr and Escherichia coli F⁻ recipients, which are 20% diverged between homologous genes (R² = 0.94). Wild-type strain (filled squares), strain with 33-fold less MutL (filled circles), strain with 4-fold less MutL (open circles), and wild-type strain overexpressing MutL (open squares) are shown. The dotted curves show the 95% confidence interval around the regression. For MutL protein quantification see Fig. 2B.