Mitsuo Sekine, Satoshi Tanikawa, Seiha Omata, Mika Saito, Takatomo Fujisawa, Naofumi Tsukatani, Takahisa Tajima, Tomohiro Sekigawa, Hiroki Kosugi, Yasunori Matsuo, Rika Nishiko, Kohsuke Imamura, Mio Ito, Hitomi Narita, Shinichi Tago, Nobuyuki Fujita, Shigeaki Harayama
Rhodococcus erythropolis strain PR4 has been isolated as an alkane-degrading bacterium. The strain harbours one linear plasmid, pREL1 (271 577 bp) and two circular plasmids, pREC1 (104 014 bp) and pREC2 (3637 bp), all with some sequence similarities to other Rhodococcus plasmids. For pREL1, pREC1 and pREC2, 298, 102 and 3 open reading frames, respectively, were predicted. Linear plasmid pREL1 has several regions homologous to plasmid pBD2 found in R. erythropolis BD2. Sequence analysis of pREL1 and pBD2 identified common metal-resistance genes on both, but pREL1 also encodes alkane-degradation genes not found on pBD2, with enzyme constituents some of which are quite different from those of other organisms...
February 2006: Environmental Microbiology