Site of cleavage of superhelical phiX174 replicative form DNA by the single strand-specific Neurospora crassa endonuclease.

Experiments with the Neurospora crassa single strand-specific endonuclease have provided evidence for the existence of regions of partially single-stranded character in covalently closed superhelical replicative form DNA of phiX174. The nuclease converts the superhelical molecules to either singly hit relaxed circular or doubly hit linear molecules. We show that the initial cleavage of phiX174 superhelical DNA is a "nick" bounded by a 5'-phosphate and a 3'-hydroxyl; no nucleotides are excised as evidenced by the ability of T4-polynucleotide ligase to reform the phosphodiester bond. The nick can be found in either strand of the double-stranded DNA and is either randomly distributed or at least can be found at any one of many possible locations in the genome. Thus, the regions in phiX174 superhelical molecules that are sensitive to the N. crassa nuclease do not occur at highly specific sites in the genome.