Activation of a cryptic gene by excision of a DNA fragment

The cryptic bgl operon in Escherichia coli K-12 strain 1011A contains a 1.4-kilobase-pair fragment of foreign DNA within the bglF structural gene. The active allele found in its descendant strain, MK1, required the precise excision of that insertion for its activation. Molecular and genetic approaches have shown that strain 1011A possessed an active (bglR+) rather than a silent wild-type (bglR0) allele of the regulatory region and that this change was caused by a point mutation. Our model for the retention of cryptic genes (B. G. Hall, S. Yokoyama, and D. H. Calhoun, Mol. Biol. Evol. 1:109-124, 1983) suggested that the insertion might have been selected to silence a disadvantageous bglR+ allele. We examined the genealogy of strain MK1 and found that the insertion of foreign DNA was not selected for that reason, since it preceded the change to bglR+. This means that the change to bglR+ was also not selected, since the presence of the insertion would not allow expression of the operon. We have calculated the probability of isolating a bglR+ mutation by chance alone as less than 10(-8). We suggest that mutation rates estimated under the usual conditions of exponential growth may be irrelevant to the frequencies of these events under natural conditions.