Formation of plasmid oligomers

[Martin Kennedy]

For those of you still wondering about formation of plasmid dimers, here are
some early references:

Hobom and Hogness (1974)	 J.Mol.Biol. 88, 65-87
Bedbrook and Ausubel (1976)	 Cell 9, 707-716
Potter and Dressler (1977)  	 PNAS 74, 4168-4172

In a nutshell, these papers demonstrated that oligomeric molecules comprised of
tandem repeats of a monomer plasmid can arise by recA dependent recombination
events.  When the different forms were isolated and transformed back into recA-
strains, the multimers retained their initial conformation.  Monomeric forms
transformed into recA- strains don't generate oligomeric forms.  I guess what
I'm trying to say is that this phenomenon has been around so long just about
everyone has forgotten about it, hence the confusion when someone "rediscovers"
plasmid dimers!!

 
Cheers,

Martin

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