EF-Tu
- Research Article | Molecular Biology and PhysiologyTranscriptional Regulation Buffers Gene Dosage Effects on a Highly Expressed Operon in Salmonella
A feature of bacterial chromosomes is that highly expressed essential genes are usually located close to the origin of replication. Because bacteria have overlapping cycles of replication, genes located close to the origin will often be present in multiple copies, and this is thought to be of selective benefit where high levels of expression support high growth rate. However, the magnitude of this selective effect and whether other...
- Research ArticleFunctional Constraints on Replacing an Essential Gene with Its Ancient and Modern Homologs
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a fundamental driving force in bacterial evolution. However, whether essential genes can be acquired by HGT and whether they can be acquired from distant organisms are very poorly understood. By systematically replacing tuf with ancestral homologs and homologs from distantly related organisms, we investigated the constraints on HGT of a highly conserved gene with multiple interaction partners....