When pol I goes into high gear: processive DNA synthesis by pol I in the cell

Pol I is the most abundant polymerase in E. coli and plays an important role in short patch repair. In accord with this role in the cell, the purified polymerase exhibits low processivity and high fidelity in vitro. Pol I is also the polymerase responsible for leader strand synthesis during ColE1 plasmid replication. In a previous publication, we described the generation of a highly error-prone DNA polymerase I. Expression of this mutant Pol I results in errors during the replication of a ColE1 plasmid. The distribution and spectrum of mutations in the ColE1 plasmid sequence downstream the ori indicates that Pol I is capable of more processive replication in vivo than previously accepted. Here, we review evidence suggesting that Pol I may be recruited into a replisome-like holoenzyme and speculate that processive DNA replication by Pol I may play a role in recombination-dependent DNA replication in the cell.