Partial exclusion of the Nocardia erythropolis chromosome in nocardial recombinants.

Segregation of genes specifying nutritional requirements and inhibitor resistance was analyzed in recombinants from crosses of Nocardia erythropolis with N. canicruria. With all employed characters as both selecting and nonselecting markers, a single linear linkage group was depicted with genes in the following order; leu-6 gly-4 purB2 tetA9 his-1 eryA7 strB2 ser-1 arg-1. The relative frequency of crossovers between gene pairs was found to decrease as the map is read from leu-6 to the right. The phenotype for arg-1 was found infrequently in recombinants. This fact, coupled with the observed decrease in crossover frequency dependent upon map position, suggested two alternative explanations to account for the observed results. (i) Zygote formation among these nocardiae is a consequence of partial, oriented chromosome transfer from N. erythropolis to N. canicruria and is similar to the mechanism of polar transfer reported in matings of Hfr by F(-)Escherichia coli. (ii) Being of diverse origin, the chromosomes of N. erythropolis and N. canicruria are not completely homologous, and decrease in crossover frequency dependent upon map position results from such chromosomal heterology. In this hypothesis, the infrequent occurrence of arg-1 among recombinants is considered to be an artifact resulting from the action of a previously unrecognized suppressor gene for arg-1 present in N. canicruria.