Mechanisms of assembly of the enzyme-ssDNA complexes required for recombination-dependent DNA synthesis and repair in bacteriophage T4.

Abstract

During late stages of bacteriophage T4 infection in E. coli, the initiation of phage DNA replication is dependent on the homologous recombination activity of the T4 uvsX protein. In vitro, uvsX protein initiates DNA synthesis on a duplex template by inserting the 3{prime} end of a homologous ssDNA molecule into the duplex. The resulting D-loop structure serves as a primer-template junction for the assembly of the T4 replication fork. Two key steps in this initiation process are (A) the assembly of uvsX-ssDNA complexes necessary for recombination activity and for the priming of lead-strand DNA synthesis, and (B) the assembly of the T4 primosome (gp41 helicase/gp61 primase complex) onto the single-stranded template for lagging-strand synthesis. Our laboratory is focusing on the mechanisms of these two different but related enzyme-ssDNA assembly processes. In this extended abstract, we describe recent efforts in our laboratory to elucidate the mechanism by which the gp41 helicase enzyme is assembled onto gp32-covered ssDNA, a process requiring the activity of a special helicase assembly factor, the T4 gp59 protein.