Mechanisms Essential for Stable Inheritance of Mini-F Plasmid

Abstract
F plasmid of Escherichia coli is known to be stably maintained in dividing cells, despite of low copy number per cell. Mini-F plasmids, which were constructed in vitro from the 9.2 kb EcoRI-generated f5 fragment of the F plasmid, are also stably inherited, even though the copy number is still low (for review, see Ref. 1). We have sought to understand the molecular mechanisms involved in the stable maintenance of mini-F.