Analysis of Tn5 inversion events in Escherichia coli plasmids

The ability of the bacterial transposon Tn5 to undergo sequence inversion in Rec+ Escherichia coli cells as a result of recombination between its duplicated IS50 elements was examined using specially designed plasmid constructs. Surprisingly, recombination events in the IS50 elements that led to crossover and therefore Tn5 inversion could be detected at a frequency of only 10(-5). This was approximately an order of magnitude lower than the frequency of IS50 recombination that led to conversion events (i.e. non-reciprocal recombination) without crossover, and at least two orders of magnitude lower than the frequency of intermolecular recombination between IS50 elements on two different plasmids. These rare conversion and inversion events in Tn5 appeared to be due to intramolecular recombination and not simply to multiple rounds of reciprocal crossing over, since the heterodimeric intermediates that would be generated during the latter process could be readily isolated but were shown to yield a completely different set of plasmid products upon resolution.