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Gene 259 (2000) 207–215 www.elsevier.com/locate/gene The orientation bias of Chi sequences is a general tendency of G-rich oligomers Reina Uno, Yoichi Nakayama, Kazuharu Arakawa, Masaru Tomita * Laboratory for Bioinformatics, Keio University 5322 Endo, Fujisawa, Kanagawa 252-8502, Japan Received 18 April 2000; received in revised form 7 July 2000; accepted 8 September 2000 Received by T. Gojobori Abstract The Chi sequences are specific oligomers that stimulate DNA repair by homologous recombination, and are different sequences in each organism. Approximately 75% of the copies of the Chi sequence (5∞-GCTGGTGG-3∞) of Escherichia coli reside on the leading strand, and this orientation bias is often believed to be a consequence of the biological role of Chi sequences as the signal sequence of RecBCD pathway in DNA replication. However, our computer analysis found that many G-rich oligomers also show this asymmetric orientation pattern. The shift in the Chi orientation bias appears around the replication origin and terminus, but these locations are also coincident with the shift points in GC content or GC skew. We conducted the same analysis with the genome of Bacillus subtilis, and found that in addition to Chi, other G-rich oligomers show similar asymmetric orientation patterns, whose shift points were coincident with those of the GC skew. However, the genome of Haemophilus influenzae Rd, whose GC skew is not so pronounced, does not clearly show asymmetric orientation patterns of Chi or other G-rich oligomers. These results lead us to suggest that the uneven distribution of the Chi orientation between the two strands of the double helix is mostly due to the uneven distribution of G content (GC skew) and that the replication-related function of Chi sequences is not the primary factor responsible for the evolutionary pressure causing the orientation bias. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Comparative genomics; Computational analysis; DNA replication; GC skew; Homologous recombination 1. Introduction Chi sequences (5∞-GCTGGTGG-3∞) are cis-acting DNA elements that enhance recombination promoted by the RecBCD pathway in E. coli (Smith et al., 1995). The Chi sequence attenuates the activity of 3∞-to-5∞ exonucleases and activates a weaker 5∞-to-3∞ exonuclease but does not affect the helicase activity of RecBCD (Dixon and Kowalczykowski, 1991). It has been proposed that the orientation of the Chi sequences plays an important role in the reconstruction of arrested replication forks (Horiuchi and Fujimura, 1995; Kuzminov, 1995; Cox, 1998). After replication fork arrest and the introduction from the double-stranded Abbreviations: Chi , Chi-like sequence of B. subtilis; Chi , Chi BS EC sequence of E. coli; Chi , Chi-like sequence of H. influenzae; ds DNA, HI double-stranded DNA; ss DNA, single-stranded DNA. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +81-466-47-5111; fax: +81-466-47-5099. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Tomita) (ds) break, RecBCD enters the ds DNA molecule and degrades it into a single-stranded (ss) DNA with a 3∞ -OH end and oligonucleotides (Seigneur et al., 1998; Michel, 2000). When the enzyme meets a properly oriented Chi sequence, its exonuclease activity is suppressed, and the helicase activity creates ss DNA tails, which are then used by RecA and ss DNA-binding proteins to form a D-loop with intact sequences having homology with the ss tails (Marians, 2000). On the D-loop molecule, a new replication fork is then reconstructed. The whole genome sequence project (Blattner et al., 1997; Itoh et al., 1999) of E. coli revealed that 75% of all Chi sequences are oriented in the direction of DNA replication ( Eggleston and West, 1997). These properties of RecBCD and Chi sequences have led to the widely accepted notion that Chi sequences are over-represented on the leading strand to direct the activity of RecBCD enzymes toward OriC (Blattner et al., 1997; Tracy et al., 1997b; Cox, 1998). The analogs of Chi sequences in E. coli (Chi ) that are also G-rich ( El Karoui et al., 1999) EC 0378-1119/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0 3 7 8 -1 1 1 9 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 43 0 - 3 208 R. Uno et al. / Gene 259 (2000) 207–215 are found in B. subtilis (Chi 5∞-AGCGG-3∞), H. BS influenzae (Chi 5∞-GNTGGTGG-3’ and 5∞-G[C/G ]TGHI GAGG-3∞), and Lactococcus lactis (Chi 5∞-GCGCGLL TG-3∞) (Biswas et al., 1995; Chédin et al., 1998; Sourice et al., 1998). Every Chi sequence found is known to have a role in attenuating 5∞-to-3∞ exonuclease activity, and Chi has already been identified as having recombiLL nase activity ( El Karoui et al., 1998). In addition, research has shown that the processing of ds DNA end by the AddAB enzyme produces a duplex DNA molecule with a protruding 3∞-terminated ss tail, a universal intermediate of the recombination process in B. subtilis (Chédin et al., 2000). While these functions of RecBCD (in H. influenzae), AddAB (in B. subtilis), and RexAB (in L. lactis) are conserved, the structures of these proteins are not (El Karoui et al., 1999). The GC skew, which represents a bias of G over C content in one of the duplex DNA strands, is clearly visible in the leading strands of the chromosomes of E. coli and B. subtilis but not as evident on that of H. influenzae (Lobry, 1996; Blattner et al., 1997; Francino and Ochman, 1997; Mrázek and Karlin, 1998). Regions on the DNA containing a shift in GC content (hereafter referred to as the shift point of the GC skew) often correlate with the locations of the replication origin and terminus. Several explanations for the cause of GC skew have been suggested: 1. Asymmetric DNA replication between the leading and lagging strands could result in strand-dependent mutation patterns (Lobry, 1996; Francino and Ochman, 1997; Beletskii and Bhagwat, 1998). 2. The requirement that genes that encode proteins cause biases in the base composition at codon positions 1 and 2 on the sense strand (McLean et al., 1998; Mrázek and Karlin, 1998; Romero et al., 2000). It is proposed that 75% of the Chi sequences are oriented for the replication mechanism. However, it is also known that several octamer sequences switch their preferred orientation at the replication origin of several genomes (Salzberg et al., 1998). Species in which GC skew is clearly observed tend to contain many biased oligomers. In this work, we hypothesized that the Chi sequence reflects the tendency of the genome exemplified by the GC skew, so the orientation bias of the Chi sequence did not result from its function in replication mechanism. Under this hypothesis, the orientations of all G-rich oligomers should be similar to that of the Chi sequence. The genomes of E. coli, B. subtilis, and H. influenzae were analyzed (Fig. 1) for this purpose. 2. Materials and methods The complete genome sequences of the three prokaryotes were downloaded from the GenBank database (ftp://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/genomes/). GC skew was estimated from the formula (C−G)/(C+G) with non-overlapping windows whose lengths were fixed at Fig. 1. GC skew (upper) and the distribution of Chi sequences ( lower). Non-overlapping windows of 10 kb were used for this analysis. In each graph of Chi distribution, vertical lines above the center indicate positions of the Chi sequences on one DNA strand, and lines below the center indicate positions on the complementary strand. Arrows indicate the replication origin and terminus. Clear shift points of GC skew and of Chi distribution correspond to the replication origin and terminus in (a) E. coli, (b) B. subtilis and (c) H. influenzae. No clear shift point is observed in H. influenzae. R. Uno et al. / Gene 259 (2000) 207–215 209 Fig. 2. Calculation process of orientation fraction. The orientation fraction, that is expressed as the percentage of an oligomer, was calculated as follows. We counted the number of occurrences of an oligomer on both strands, then counted the number of occurrences in the direction of replication, and calculated the fraction of these counts. The orientation fractions from tetramer to octamer were calculated. 10 kb. The value of the GC skew is positive when the number of Cs is more than that of Gs in the same window, or vice versa. Transition of GC skew values over the entire genome was then graphed. The orientation fraction of oligomers was defined as the number of oligomers oriented towards the origin of replication divided by the total number of oligomers (Fig. 2). The data set was arranged according to the number of Gs in the oligomers, in order to clarify the effect of the GC skew. The orientation fractions were calculated and plotted for all oligomers of different lengths for the genomes of E. coli, B. subtilis and H. influenzae. For calculation, we defined the shift points of leading and lagging strands, in other words, the replicational origin and terminus, as follows: in OriC (3 923 488 bp) and in TerC (1 607 942 bp) for E. coli, in OriC (1 bp) and in TerC (2 017 790 bp) for B. subtilis, and in the putative origin (602 999 bp) and between the two potential terminating sequences identified by homology (1 506 292 bp) for H. influenzae (Fleischmann et al., 1995; Blattner et al., 1997; Kunst et al., 1997). 3. Results The orientation fractions of hexamers, heptamers and octamers on the E. coli genome were calculated. The distributions of plots and their averages shift to a higher fraction as the G content of oligomers increases ( Fig. 3). This shift must be caused by the asymmetry in G content between both strands, and this corresponds to the GC skew. Although Chi sequences have higher orientation fractions than the averages, many other octamers have even higher fractions ( Fig. 3c). The orientation fractions of the three hexamers CTGGTG, TGGTGG and GCTGGT, which are composites of the Chi sequence, were also above the average (Fig. 3a). As for B. subtilis, the distributions that showed an obvious G content bias were similar to those of E. coli ( Fig 1b). The GC skew of B. subtilis represents a strand bias in G content and it has a direct influence on the orientation bias of G-rich oligomers. The Chi sequences of B. subtilis also had an orientation bias toward the leading strand (Fig. 4), and shift points occurred around the origin and terminus of replication (Chédin et al., 1998). However, the orientation fractions of the Chi sequences were almost equal to the average bias of pentamers containing three Gs. This result indicates that the orientation bias is not specific to the Chi sequences and is separable from the proposed biological role of the Chi in the replication machinery. The sequences 5∞-GNTGGTGG-3∞ and 5∞-G[G/C ]TGGAGG-3∞ in H. influenzae are reported to have functions analogous to those of Chi sequence in E. coli. (Sourice et al., 1998). The results of our analysis of these sequences are shown in Fig. 1c. Unlike E. coli and B. subtilis, almost no orientation bias or clear shift points were observed at the origin and terminus of replication. Fig. 5 shows that the correlation between the orientation fraction and the number of Gs in the oligomers of H. influenzae was also not as significant as that in E. coli and B. subtilis. The orientation fractions of the Chi sequences in H. influenzae were below average, except for one sequence, GGTGGTGG ( Fig. 5d ). 210 R. Uno et al. / Gene 259 (2000) 207–215 (a) (b) Fig. 3. Orientation fractions of hexamers (a), heptamers (b) and octamers (c) in E. coli. The horizontal axis represents the orientation fraction, which is the fraction of skewed distribution with respect to DNA replication. We classified oligomers by G content (the number of Gs) and analyzed each group; the vertical axis represents the G content. In addition, oligomers whose fraction was under 50% were removed from the data because the fraction of their complementary sequence is always more than 50%. The result suggests that the Chi sequences of E. coli are not selectively located on the leading strand, but all G-rich oligomers tend to be located on the leading strand. Although this Chi sequence GGTGGTGG displayed some orientation bias, its orientation fraction did not differ significantly from those of other random oligo- mers. The orientation fractions of all other Chi sequences were below average, and most of them showed no correlation with the direction of replication. R. Uno et al. / Gene 259 (2000) 207–215 211 (c) Fig. 3. (continued). Fig. 4. (a–d ) Orientation fraction of 4–7mers in B. subtilis. Like E. coli, B. subtilis clearly shows the correlation between the orientation fraction and the G content of all oligomers. The orientation fraction of the Chi sequence of B. subtilis in (b) is only about average. 212 R. Uno et al. / Gene 259 (2000) 207–215 Fig. 5. (a–c) Orientation fraction of 6–8mers of H. influenzae genome. H. influenzae shows less correlation between the orientation fraction and the G content. The six Chi sequences are located lower than, or near, the average orientation fraction (c), and some of them show no orientation bias. 4. Discussion 4.1. Orientational bias of Chi sequence depends on the bias of Guanines In summary, the GC skew and the orientation bias of oligomers are strongly correlated, and the orientation bias of Chi sequences does not significantly differ from those of other G-rich oligomers (Fig. 6). While the Chi sequences of E. coli were oriented with a slight bias, many other oligomers showed a greater orientation bias. The species that showed a clear GC skew (E. coli and B. subtilis) also showed a clearly biased orientation pattern, whereas species with an unclear GC skew (H. influenzae) showed an unclear orientation pattern. Regardless of whether the hypotheses listed in Section 1 about the source of GC skew are true, the orientation bias of Chi sequences seems to be mostly due to the genomic asymmetry in G content, just like any other G-rich oligomers in E. coli and B. subtilis, and not primarily due to the proposed function of Chi sequences related to DNA replication. However, there still remains a possibility that RecBCD and its analogs have selected biased oligomers to exercise their functions. It has already been shown experimentally that certain sequences of H. influenzae, whose Chi sequences do not show a clear GC skew, have the same function as those of Chi in E. coli and B. subtilis, at least for the attenuation of exonuclease activity. If we assume that the requirements of the homologous recombination pathway of E. coli are the same as those of B. subtilis and H. influenzae, we can say that the function-based orientation hypothesis ( Horiuchi and Fujimura, 1995) of the Chi sequence does not suffice to explain the differences in the oligomer skew among these species. We have already mentioned a couple of reasons for the presence of GC skew in Section 1, but another possibility is that the GC skew was formed because of the orientation bias of the Chi sequence (Tillier and Collins, 2000) and the requirements of the RecBCD pathway. It was reported that RecA as well as Rad51, which is a homolog of RecA in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has a high affinity for GT-rich sequences (Tracy and Kowalczykowski, 1996; Tracy et al., 1997a), and that Chi is frequently located in GT-rich ‘recombination EC islands’ that are highly recombinogenic (Tracy et al., 1997b). RecA homologues and the Chi sequences in other species may have a similar affinity and genomic tendency. If the GT-rich ‘recombination islands’ sur- R. Uno et al. / Gene 259 (2000) 207–215 213 Fig. 6. Summary of the orientation fraction of Chi sequences. The vertical line represents the average orientation fractions of all oligomers with the same number of Gs as in Chi. The distance of each Chi orientation fraction from the average fraction is indicated by triangles. rounding the Chi sequences are the source of compositional asymmetry of the genome, GC skew of the ‘recombination islands’ must have an effect on the GC skew of the whole leading strand. However, the GC skew of the ‘recombination islands’ multiplied by the percentage they encompass in the whole genome, which is 17% (Tracy et al., 1997b), is only 25.2% of the GC skew of the whole leading strand. Moreover, only 75% of all ‘recombination islands’ is in the leading strand, and the remaining 25% have a negative affect on the asymmetry of the genome. Taking this fact into consideration, the net effect of the ‘recombination islands’ will be 12.6%, and our calculation shows that it is insignificant to say that they are the source of compositional asymmetry. 4.2. Orientation and number are independent characteristics of the Chi sequence Our results suggest that the Chi orientation depends on the bias of guanines. This is controversial in terms of the hypothesis of the replication-dependent function of Chi sequence; however, our results do not deny the importance of the frequency of Chi sequence. Even if the orientation of Chi sequence is due to the base composition and not due to the replication mechanism, Chi is definitely a signal sequence during replication fork arrest, and so its frequency is essential. It is suggested that RecBCD has another role in protecting the cell from invasion by foreign DNA ( Kowalczykowski et al., 1994; Kuzminov, 1995) such as bacteriophage DNA. Therefore, the orientation and number are independent characteristics of Chi sequence, and our results are not in conflict with the replicationindependent role of RecBCD. 4.3. Relationship among replication, transcription, and recombination It was reported that Chi sequences correlate more with the direction of transcription than with that of replication (Bell et al., 1998; Lao and Forsdyke, 2000). The direction of replication and transcription coincide in only 54% of genes in E. coli, and so these directions do not seem to be in a causal relationship. There are suggestions about the characteristic context of selected codon-usage around the Chi sequences (Biaudet et al., 1998; Colbert et al., 1998). According to these facts, the orientation bias of the Chi sequence seems to be affected more by transcription than by replication. Recent studies indicate an interplay among the mechanisms of transcription, replication, and recombination in E. coli (McGlynn and Lloyd., 2000). According to this model, replication is blocked when the DNA polymerase meets a stalled RNA polymerase at a lesion in the DNA. This model provides an insight into the relationship among the three functions. As already mentioned, our results show that the orientation bias in the direction of replication is one of the general properties of G-rich oligomers. Therefore, the replication-related function of the Chi sequence is not the primary factor responsible for the evolutionary pressure causing the orientation bias. 214 R. Uno et al. / Gene 259 (2000) 207–215 An unanswered issue is how homologous recombination works in DNA replication. The fork reconstruction model (Horiuchi and Fujimura, 1995) is not contested by our results, and it is possible that the number of Chi sequences oriented in the direction of replication is more than enough for fork reconstruction, even in H. influenzae. A Chi sequence can stimulate recombination within a region located up to 10 kb away, and the three bacteria analyzed here have enough oriented Chi sequences to cover the whole genome. It should be noted that our results do not deny any functional characteristics of the Chi sequence; we only showed that the cause of its biased orientation is not primarily due to its function. Acknowledgements We thank Ichizo Kobayashi, Takashi Horiuchi, Naofumi Handa, Hirotada Mori and Stephen C. Kowalczykowski for helpful suggestions during this work. Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge the technical advice by Hiroaki Sakai, Takanori Washio, Kenji Yotsutani, Yumi Kawamura, Naota Ishikawa and Takehito Mogami. 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