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Updated: Aug 23, 2026

Kinetics of Lagging-strand DNA Synthesis In Vitro by the Bacteriophage T7 Replication Proteins
Published on: February 25, 2017
UvsX recombinase and Dda helicase rescue stalled bacteriophage T4 DNA replication forks in vitro
Farid A Kadyrov1, John W Drake
1Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, NIEHS, National Institutes of Health, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709-2233, USA.
Abstract:
The rescue of stalled replication forks via a series of steps that include fork regression, template switching, and fork restoration often has been proposed as a major mechanism for accurately bypassing non-coding DNA lesions. Bacteriophage T4 encodes almost all of the proteins required for its own DNA replication, recombination, and repair. Both recombination and recombination repair in T4 rely on UvsX, a RecA-like recombinase. We show here that UvsX plus the T4-encoded helicase Dda suffice to rescue stalled T4 replication forks in vitro. This rescue is based on two sequential template-switching reactions that allow DNA replication to bypass a non-coding DNA lesion in a non-mutagenic manner.
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