Mixing active-site components: a recipe for the unique enzymatic activity of a telomere resolvase.

ABSTRACT: The ResT protein, a telomere resolvase from Borrelia burgdorferi, processes replication intermediates into linear replicons with hairpin ends by using a catalytic mechanism similar to that for tyrosine recombinases and type IB topoisomerases. We have identified in ResT a hairpin binding region typically found in cut-and-paste transposases. We show that substitution of residues within this region results in a decreased ability of these mutants to catalyze telomere resolution. However, the mutants are capable of resolving heteroduplex DNA substrates designed to allow spontaneous destabilization and prehairpin formation. These findings support the existence of a hairpin binding region in ResT, the only known occurrence outside a transposase. The combination of transposase-like and tyrosine-re

SUBMITTER: Bankhead T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC518831 | biostudies-literature | 2004 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature