Fig. 1.

Small plasmids. a, General genetic organization of small ColE1-type plasmids from K. pneumoniae and other Enterobacteriaceae. b, Alignment of the nucleotide sequences of the replication regions of K. pneumoniae ColE1-type plasmids using CLUSTAL W (143). c, Alignment of the nucleotide sequences of Xer site-specific recombination sites of K. pneumoniae ColE1-type plasmids using CLUSTAL W. The ARG box, XerC and XerD binding sites are shown in color and the central regions are boxed. Blue capital letters indicate the most important conserved nucleotides in the ARG box. Downward pointing arrowhead shows the conserved T nucleotide that its found substituted by a C in several Xer site-specific recombination sites (76, 81, 88).