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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1992 Oct 15;89(20):9642–9646. doi: 10.1073/pnas.89.20.9642

Symmetry in the mechanism of bacteriophage lambda integrative recombination.

A B Burgin Jr 1, H A Nash 1
PMCID: PMC50188  PMID: 1409677

Abstract

During the strand-exchange events of bacteriophage lambda integration, pairs of phosphodiester bonds are broken and then rejoined to form novel DNA linkages. The reaction proceeds in vitro in the absence of an external energy source; the bond energy needed to rejoin broken strands of DNA must therefore be conserved during cleavage. Although some of this conservation involves a covalent intermediate between DNA and the recombinase Int, it is possible that such an intermediate is formed with only one of the two phosphodiesters. In such an asymmetric mechanism, the second phosphodiester would be attacked by a nucleophile that is exposed by cleavage of the first DNA strand. In contrast, a symmetric mechanism hypothesizes nucleophilic attack by Int on both phosphodiesters. We have distinguished these two mechanisms by removing potential nucleophiles from the integrative recombination reaction. Our data are inconsistent with an asymmetric mechanism. We conclude that during strand exchange both phosphodiesters proceed through a covalent protein-DNA intermediate.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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