Fractionation of ϕX174 Specific Messenger RNA (original) (raw)

1. Yukimasa Hayashi and
2. Masaki Hayashi
3. Department of Biology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California

Excerpt

The small circular DNA of the bacteriophage ϕX174, would contain about ten cistrons on the oasis of its molecular weight (1.7 × 106) (Sinsheimer, 1959). Nine cistrons have been identified by complementation tests with conditional lethal mutants, and their functions have been tentatively assigned (Fig. 1) (Baker and Tessman, 1967; Sinsheimer, 1968; Jeng and Hayashi, 1970; Jeng, Gelfand, Hayashi, Shleser, and Tessman, 1970; Gelfand and Hayashi, 1970). A genome with so few cistrons is ideally suited for studying nucleic acid and protein synthesis involved in the expression of all its genes. As part of an ongoing program examining these processes in vivo and in vitro, we describe here the occurrence of discrete size distribution of ϕX174 messenger RNAs (mRNA) isolated from infected cells and separated by electrophoresis in polyacrylamide gels.

The Rate of mRNA Synthesis

ϕX174 mRNA is transcribed from the DNA strand which is complementary to the original phage...