Pritikin, William B. (University of California, Los Angeles), and W. R. Romig. Death of Bacillus subtilis auxotrophs due to deprivation of thymine, tryptophan, or uracil, J. Bacteriol. 92:291-296. 1966.-Auxotrophic mutants of Bacillus subtilis 168 that require either tryptophan, uracil, or thymine died rapidly when deprived of any of these compounds. Phage PBS1 was produced by infected B. subti...

Schizosaccharomyces pombe Δura4 cells lyse when grown on YPD medium. A S. pombe non-essential gene deletion library was screened to determine suppressors of the lysis phenotype. Deletion of the pub1 gene, which encoded E3 ubiquitin ligase, strongly suppressed cell lysis in Δura4 cells. The Δpub1 cells displayed high sensitivity to 5-fluorouracil, a toxic analog of uracil, and this sensitivity w...

Uracil uptake by Saccharomyces cerevisiae is mediated by the FUR4-encoded uracil permease. This permease undergoes endocytosis and subsequent degradation in cells subjected to adverse conditions. The data presented here show that uracil permease also undergoes basal turnover under normal growth conditions. Both basal and induced turnover depend on the essential Npi1p/Rsp5p ubiquitin-protein lig...

G:U mismatches resulting from deamination of cytosine are the most common promutagenic lesions occurring in DNA. Uracil is removed in a base-excision repair pathway by uracil DNA-glycosylase (UDG), which excises uracil from both single- and double-stranded DNA. Recently, a biochemically distinct family of DNA repair enzymes has been identified, which excises both uracil and thymine, but only fr...

In this study, we adapted the well known uracil DNA glycosylase (UNG) carry-over prevention system for PCR, and applied it to the analysis of DNA methylation based on sodium bisulfite conversion. As sodium bisulfite treatment converts unmethylated cytosine bases into uracil residues, bisulfite treated DNA is sensitive to UNG treatment. Therefore, UNG cannot be used for carry-over prevention of ...

A uracil-DNA glycosylase gene was cloned from Chlamydia pneumoniae AR39 and expressed in E. coli strains BL21 (DE3) and BL21 (DE3) pLysS. After purification by Ni-NTA His x Bind Resin and DEAE Sepharose Fast Flow column chromatography, recombinant CpUDG with a specific activity of 1,000,000 U/mg was obtained. The enzymatic activity of the purified CpUDG protein was further characterized using o...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an ubiquitous, opportunistic pathogen whose biofilms are notoriously difficult to control. Here we discover uracil influences all three known quorum-sensing (QS) pathways of P. aeruginosa. By screening 5850 transposon mutants for altered biofilm formation, we identified seven uracil-related mutations that abolished biofilm formation. Whole-transcriptome studies showed ...

In a previous study, we found that 2-deoxyribonolactone is effectively generated in the specific 5-bromouracil ((Br)U)-substituted sequence 5'-(G/C)[A]n = 1,2 (Br)U(Br)U-3' and proposed that a formed uracil-5-yl radical mainly abstracts the C1' hydrogen from the 5'-side of (Br)U(Br)U under 302-nm irradiation condition. In the present work, we performed photoirradiation of (Br)U-substituted DNA ...

High folate intake may increase the risk of cancer, especially in the elderly. The present study examined the effects of ageing and dietary folate on uracil misincorporation into DNA, which has a mutagenic effect, in the mouse colon and liver. Old (18 months; n 42) and young (4 months; n 42) male C57BL/6 mice were pair-fed with four different amino acid-defined diets for 20 weeks: folate deplet...