Frameshift mutations induced by an Escherichia coli strain carrying a mutator gene, mutD5.

We have studied eight frameshift mutations induced by the Escherichia coli mutator allele mutD5 in a derivative of the bacteriophage M13mp8, carrying an insertion of 91 base pairs derived from the tetR gene of pBR 322. All mutations were analyzed by the dideoxy sequencing method and were found to be deletions of a GC base pair which occurred in regions characterized by the presence of at least two GC base pairs. We have attempted to explain these results by the looping-out model, which was previously proposed to unify the results obtained with mutD5.