Deoxyribonucleic acid synthesis after inhibition of initiation of rounds of replication in Escherichia coli B/r.

The theory describing the effect of inhibition of initiation of rounds of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) replication on the accumulation of DNA is derived, and an analysis is presented which allows the determination of the time C taken to replicate the bacterial chromosome from the kinetic changes in the accumulation of DNA. This analysis is applied to experiments in which inhibition of initiation was achieved by inhibiting protein or protein and ribonucleic acid synthesis with chloramphenicol or rifampin. The results for both antibiotics are identical and indicate that there is a delay of 6 to 11 min in the effect of the antibiotics on initiation of rounds of replication. If this delay is taken into account, then the value of the C period estimated from such experiments agrees with values obtained by other methods, whereas by conventional data evaluation of such experiments the C period would be overestimated. In the low thymine-requiring derivative of Escherichia coli B/r ATCC 12407 used here, the C period was found to be between 38 and 41 min for cultures growing with a mass doubling time of 29 min in glucose-amino acids medium, supplemented with 20 micrograms of thymine/ml.