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1. Introduction
2. The anatomy of multicopy plasmids
3. Multicopy plasmid transmission during division
4. Metabolic load destabilises plasmids
5. Plasmid clustering may cause instability
6. Plasmid dimers and instability - dimer catastrophe
7. Distribution of plasmid dimers in culture
8. Recombination destabilises multicopy vectors
9. Plasmid multimer resolution
10. Converting dimers to monomers
11. The Xer-cer system of ColE1
12. The ColE1 cer nucleoprotein complex
13. Site inter-wrapping and recombination
14. Complex architecture and recombination
15. The gear shift-like recombination process
16. Simulation of the gear shift recombination
17. Supercoiling can facilitate recombination
18. Can recombination combat dimer catastrophe?
19. Preventing cell division before dimer resolution
20. Loss of Rcd checkpoint causes instability
21. Structure and function of Rcd
22. Identifying Rcd's target by affinity chromatography
23. Rcd stimulates indole production by tryptophanase
24. Multimers with cer sites elevate indole levels
25. E. coli exhibits a biphasic response to indole
26. Indole inhibits cell division by unknown mechanism
27. Summary
28. Further reading

Topics Covered

• Multicopy plasmid inheritance
• The causes of plasmid instability
• Plasmid multimer formation and the dimer catastrophe
• Plasmid dimer resolution by site-specific recombination
• The Rcd checkpoint and its role in multicopy plasmid stability

Links

Series:

• Biology and Significance of Plasmids

Categories:

• Genetics & Epigenetics
• Microbiology

Talk Citation

Publication History

• Published on January 28, 2008
• Archived on May 28, 2025

Financial Disclosures

• Dr. David Summers has not informed HSTalks of any commercial/financial relationship that it is appropriate to disclose.