The Evolutionary History of a DNA Methylase Reveals Frequent Horizontal Transfer and Within-Gene Recombination.

ABSTRACT: Inteins, often referred to as protein introns, are highly mobile genetic elements that invade conserved genes throughout the tree of life. Inteins have been found to invade a wide variety of key genes within actinophages. While in the process of conducting a survey of these inteins in actinophages, we discovered that one protein family of methylases contained a putative intein, and two other unique insertion elements. These methylases are known to occur commonly in phages as orphan methylases (possibly as a form of resistance to restriction-modification systems). We found that the methylase family is not conserved within phage clusters and has a disparate distribution across divergent phage groups. We determined that two of the three insertion elements have a patchy distribution within the

SUBMITTER: Gosselin SP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9957025 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature