Staphylococcus aureus helicase but not Escherichia coli helicase stimulates S. aureus primase activity and maintains initiation specificity.

ABSTRACT: Bacterial primases are essential for DNA replication due to their role in polymerizing the formation of short RNA primers repeatedly on the lagging-strand template and at least once on the leading-strand template. The ability of recombinant Staphylococcus aureus DnaG primase to utilize different single-stranded DNA templates was tested using oligonucleotides of the sequence 5'-CAGA (CA)5 XYZ (CA)3-3', where XYZ represented the variable trinucleotide. These experiments demonstrated that S. aureus primase synthesized RNA primers predominately on templates containing 5'-d(CTA)-3' or TTA and to a much lesser degree on GTA-containing templates, in contrast to results seen with the Escherichia coli DnaG primase recognition sequence 5'-d(CTG)-3'. Primer synthesis was initiated complementarily to

SUBMITTER: Koepsell SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1482979 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature