Sequence analysis of a cryptic plasmid from Flavobacterium sp. KP1, a psychrophilic bacterium

A cryptic plasmid found at high copy number was isolated from Flavobacteriu m sp. KPI, a psychrophilic Gram-negative bacterium, cloned, and sequenced. The sequence will appear in the DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank databases under the acces sion number AB007196. The pFL1 plasmid is 2311 nucleotides in length with 3 2.7% GC content, and shows a distinctive nucleotide sequence without homolo gy to other plasmids of similar length. The plasmid contains two open readi ng frames of significant length, ORFI and ORFII. ORFI encodes a protein sim ilar to the replication proteins found in Gram-negative bacterial plasmids, Bacteroides fragilis plasmid pBI143 and Zymomonas mobilis plasmid pZM2. Th e putative translation product of ORFII shows homologies with plasmid recom bination proteins found mainly in Gram-positive bacterial plasmids such as Staphylococcus aureus plasmid pT181. (C) 1999 Federation of European Microb iological Societies. Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved .