IDENTIFICATION OF A NOVEL COMPOSITE TRANSPOSABLE ELEMENT, TN5280, CARRYING CHLOROBENZENE DIOXYGENASE GENES OF PSEUDOMONAS SP STRAIN P51

Analysis of one of the regions of catabolic plasmid pP51 which encode chlorobenzene metabolism of Pseudomonas sp. strain P51 revealed that the tcbA and tcbB genes for chlorobenzene dioxygenase and dehydrogenase are located on a transposable element, Tn5280. Tn5280 showed the features of a composite bacterial transposon with iso-insertion elements (IS1066 and IS1067) at each end of the transposon oriented in an inverted position. When a 12-kb HindIII fragment of pP51 containing Tn5280 was cloned in the suicide donor plasmid pSUP202, marked with a kanamycin resistance gene, and introduced into Pseudomonas putida KT2442, Tn5280 was found to transpose into the genome at random and in single copy. The insertion elements IS1066 and IS1067 differed in a single base pair located in the inner inverted repeat and were found to be highly homologous to a class of repetitive elements of Bradyrhizobium japonicum and distantly related to IS630 of Shigella sonnei. The presence of the catabolic genes tcbA and tcbB on Tn5280 suggests a mechanism by which gene clusters can be mobilized as gene cassettes and joined with others to form novel catabolic pathways.