The Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposon system has been shown to enable long-term gene expression by integrating new sequences into host cell chromosomes. We found that the recently reported SB100x hyperactive transposase conferred a surprisingly high level of long-term expression after hydrodynamic delivery of luciferase-encoding reporter transposons in the mouse. We conducted dose-ranging studies...

Since the maize transposon Ac can relocate to a new location within the genome, it has been used in removing selectable markers in transgenic plants. We previously developed an inducible transposon system to truncate a selectable marker in transgenic plants by locating one end of the transposon in the intron of the marker gene (glyphosate tolerant epsps gene). We have now improved upon this sys...

The Sulfur gene of tobacco is nuclearly encoded. A Su allele at this locus acts as a dominant semilethal mutation and causes reduced accumulation of chlorophyll, resulting in a yellow color in the plant. An engineered transposon tagging system, based upon the maize element Ac/Ds, was used to mutate the gene. High frequency of transposon excision from the Su locus produced variegated sectors. Pl...

Coliphage P1 was used to transduce derivatives of transposons Tn5 and mini-Mu into marine Vibrio spp. Transposon Tn5 encoding tetracycline resistance (Tn5-132) was used to isolate mutants of Vibrio harveyi defective in genes for bioluminescence (lux). Insertion of transposon Tn5-132 into the lux gene region was demonstrated by intraspecific transduction with phage hv-1 and by Southern blot hybr...

Hermes is a member of the hAT transposon superfamily that has active representatives, including McClintock's archetypal Ac mobile genetic element, in many eukaryotic species. The crystal structure of the Hermes transposase-DNA complex reveals that Hermes forms an octameric ring organized as a tetramer of dimers. Although isolated dimers are active in vitro for all the chemical steps of transpos...

The smallest known DNA transposases are those from the IS200/IS605 family. Here we show how the interplay of protein and DNA activates TnpA, the Helicobacter pylori IS608 transposase, for catalysis. First, transposon end binding causes a conformational change that aligns catalytically important protein residues within the active site. Subsequent precise cleavage at the left and right ends, the ...

We describe here a transposon-based DNA sequencing strategy that allows the introduction of sequencing priming sites throughout a target sequence by bacterial mating. A miniplasmid was designed to select against transposon insertions into the vector. Sites of transposon insertion are mapped by the polymerase chain reaction with bacterial overnight cultures providing the templates. A small set o...

Transposon mutagenesis is a method that allows gene disruption via the random genomic insertion of a piece of DNA called a transposon. The protocol below outlines a method for high efficiency transfer between bacterial strains of a plasmid harboring a transposon containing a kanamycin resistance marker. The plasmid-borne transposase is encoded by a variant tnp gene that inserts the transposon i...

We describe a method to screen pools of DNA from multiple transposon lines for insertions in many genes simultaneously. We use thermal asymmetric interlaced-PCR, a hemispecific PCR amplification protocol that combines nested, insertion-specific primers with degenerate primers, to amplify DNA flanking the transposons. In reconstruction experiments with previously characterized Arabidopsis lines ...

We report a transposase gene (tnpA) upstream of the opdA phosphotriesterase gene of Agrobacterium radiobacter P230, as well as inverted repeats indicative of insertion sequences, flanking the two genes. Both the tnpA gene and the inverted repeats resemble the Tn610 transposon from Mycobacterium fortuitum. Two additional putative open reading frames separate opdA and tnpA with inferred translati...