The Caulobacter crescentus chromosome replication origin evolved two classes of weak DnaA binding sites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Caulobacter crescentus replication initiator DnaA and essential response regulator CtrA compete to control chromosome replication. The C. crescentus replication origin (Cori) contains five strong CtrA binding sites but only two apparent DnaA boxes, termed G-boxes (with a conserved second position G, TGATCCACA). Since clusters of DnaA boxes typify bacterial replication origins, this discrepancy suggested that C. crescentus DnaA recognizes different DNA sequences or compensates with novel DNA-binding proteins. We searched for novel DNA sites by scanning mutagenesis of the most conserved Cori DNA. Autonomous replication assays showed that G-boxes and novel W-boxes (TCCCCA) are essential for replication. Further analyses showed that C. crescentus DnaA binds G-boxes with moderate and W-boxes with very weak affinities significantly below DnaA's capacity for high-affinity Escherichia coli-boxes (TTATCCACA). Cori has five conserved W-boxes. Increasing W-box affinities increases or decreases autonomous replication depending on their strategic positions between the G-boxes. In vitro, CtrA binding displaces DnaA from proximal G-boxes and from distal W-boxes implying CtrA-DnaA competition and DnaA-DnaA cooperation between G-boxes and W-boxes. Similarly, during cell cycle progression, CtrA proteolysis coincides with DnaA binding to Cori. We also observe highly conserved W-boxes in other replication origins lacking E. coli-boxes. Therefore, strategically weak DnaA binding can be a general means of replication control.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".