The role of DNA replication errors in cancer development

Despite the fact that E coli has long been a standard model system in microbiology, many proteins have yet-unknown functions in the cell. One such gene product is YhcB, an inner membrane protein whose N-terminus attaches to the cell membrane, with its C-terminus located in the cellular cytoplasm.

Previous work in the lab has indicated that YhcB may be involved with various DNA binding or repair proteins, particularly SOS inducing protein recA, and replication fork helicase rep. It is shown that while a gfp tag to the C-terminus interferes with normal protein function (showing elevated recA-gfp signals and small cell size in conjunction with a rep deletion), an mturquoise domain inserted between the N and C-terminal domains of YhcB acts like wild type. This has exciting implications for the role of the C-terminus as the "active" portion of YhcB in its interactions with cytoplasmic proteins.