Terminal inverted repeats of prokaryotic transposable element IS186 which can generate duplications of variable...

The insertion element IS186, which resides in the chromosome of Escherichia coli K-12, is 1338 bp long. Its termini represent 23-bp perfectly inverted repeats, but a variant carries a mismatch at position 23. IS186 transposes preferentially into G + C-rich sequences and generates target duplications of variable length, even at the same integration site.