Guanosine triphosphate acts as a cofactor to promote assembly of initial P-element transposase–DNA synaptic complexes
- 1Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Division of Genetics, Genomics and Development and Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Center for Integrative Genomics, and 2Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA; 3Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; 4Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
Abstract
P transposable elements in Drosophila are members of a larger class of mobile elements that move using a cut-and-paste mechanism. P-element transposase uses guanosine triphosphate (GTP) as a cofactor for transposition. Here, we use atomic force microscopy (AFM) to visualize protein-DNA complexes formed during the initial stages of P-element transposition. These studies reveal that GTP acts to promote assembly of the first detectable noncovalent precleavage synaptic complex. This initial complex then randomly and independently cleaves each P-element end. These data show that GTP acts to promote protein-DNA assembly, and may explain why P-element excision often leads to unidirectional deletions.
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Footnotes
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Article and publication are at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.1317605.
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↵5 Corresponding author. E-MAIL don_rio{at}berkeley.edu; FAX (510) 642-6062.
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- Accepted April 22, 2005.
- Received March 23, 2005.
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
