Table of Contents

Part I. Basic Mechanisms of Genome Rearrangement in Bacteria: 1. Mechanisms of homologous recombination in bacteria Marie-Agnès Petit; 2. Introduction to site-specific recombination Makkuni Jayaram and Ian Grainge; 3. Site-specific recombination by the serine recombinases Sally J. Rowland and W. Marshall Stark; 4. Mobile introns and retroelements in bacteria Steve Zimmerly; Part II. Horizontal Gene Transfer and Genome Plasticity: 5. The F-Plasmid, a paradigm for bacterial conjugation Michael J. Gubbins, William R. Will and Laura S. Frost; 6. Molecular aspects of movement of conjugative transposons Adam P. Roberts and Peter Mullany; 7. Competence for genetic transformation Irena Draskovic and David Dubnau; Part III. Biological Consequences of the Mobile Genome: 8. Phase variation and antigenic variation Richard Villemur and Eric Déziel; 9. Pathogenicity islands Bianca Hochhut and Jörg Hacker; 10. Biological consequences for bacteria of homologous recombination Diarmaid Hughes and Tobias Norström; 11. Horizontal gene transfer and bacterial genomic legacies James R. Brown.

Promotional Information

This book is concerned with the mechanisms underlying recombination in bacterial DNA.

About the Author

Peter Mullany is a Reader in Molecular Microbiology at University College London. His main research interests are the molecular biology and molecular ecology of conjugative transposons. He has been at the forefront of this work for the past 10 years and has pioneered the genetic analysis of the important human pathogen Clostridium difficile.

Reviews

'The book is well structured, thorough and thoughtful, and a rich source of information about the amazing dynamics of bacterial genomes.' Microbiology Today