Site-specific recombination between ColE1 cer and NTP16 nmr sites in vivo.

The site-specific recombination system used by multicopy plasmids of the ColE1 family uses two identical plasmid-encoded recombination sites and four bacterial proteins to catalyze the recombination reaction. In the case of the Escherichia coli plasmid ColE1, the recombination site, cer, is a 280 bp DNA sequence which is acted on by the products of the argR, pepA, xerC and xerD genes. We have constructed a model system to study this recombination system, using tandemly repeated recombination sites from the plasmids ColE1 and NTP16. These plasmids have allowed us precisely to define the region of strand exchange during site-specific recombination, and to derive a model for cer intramolecular site-specific recombination.