Gene list on a plant tumor-inducing plasmid, pti-SAKURA in Agrobacterium tumefaciens MAFF301001.

Plant infectious Agrobacteria harbor large plasmids Ti or Ri (about 200 kb), which induce crown gall or hairy root syndromes, respectively. These plasmids have three important functional regions, transfer DNA (T-DNA) region, virulence (Vir) region and conjugation transfer (Tra) region. The T-DNA region is integrated into plant chromosomes, and the subsequent expression of its plant growth hormone genes causes the formation of a crown gall or hairy root tumor. The Vir region is specifically responsible for processing T-DNA and transfer into plant chromosomes. The Tra region is involved in bacterial conjugation. These gene systems have provided the fundamental bases of plant genetic engineering. Recently, we have succeeded in the first complete sequencing of a Ti plasmid and its short report has been published. In this paper, we describe the list of genes on the plasmid, pTi-SAKURA in A. tumefadens with a detailed map, available database information and codon usage. Table 1 shows a list of 195 genes including hypothetical genes and other significant sequences on pTi-SAKURA with their function, GC% and similarity against protein sequences in the public databases. Here, the hypothetical genes indicate ORFs which were not identified in databases or had very low similarity. Although the circular map and the functional classification of these ORFs were described in the previous paper, the detailed location map is shown in Fig. 1 in which each color indicates the similar function of genes. Codon usages of total 195 genes including hypothetical genes are summarized in Table 2. As shown in Table 2, arginine codons (7.9%) are relatively rich after the commonly abundant alanine (10.9%) and leucine (9.9%) codons. A preliminary analysis of 19 probable chromosomal genes of Agrobacterium in the DNA Database showed lower arginine codons (6.3%), and al-