Predicting Knot or Catenane Type of Site-Specific Recombination Products

TL;DR

This paper presents a new model for predicting the types of knots or catenanes formed during site-specific recombination on supercoiled DNA, supported by experimental validation and application to uncharacterized data.

Contribution

The authors develop a comprehensive model that accurately predicts knot and catenane products in DNA recombination, validated by extensive experiments and applied to new data.

Findings

Model accurately predicts knot/catenane types

Experimental evidence supports model assumptions

Applied model to previously uncharacterized data

Abstract

Site-specific recombination on supercoiled circular DNA yields a variety of knotted or catenated products. We develop a model of this process, and give extensive experimental evidence that the assumptions of our model are reasonable. We then characterize all possible knot or catenane products that arise from the most common substrates. We apply our model to tightly prescribe the knot or catenane type of previously uncharacterized data.