Nature Communications (Mar 2016)

Unmasking the ancestral activity of integron integrases reveals a smooth evolutionary transition during functional innovation

  • Jose Antonio Escudero,
  • Celine Loot,
  • Vincent Parissi,
  • Aleksandra Nivina,
  • Christiane Bouchier,
  • Didier Mazel

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10937
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 12

Abstract

Read online

The integron integrases have evolved to perform recombination of single and double stranded DNA. Here the authors show that the ancestral pathway is still functional at double stranded sites, revealing the evolution towards the modern resolution pathway.