A FINE STRUCTURE MAP OF THE SALMONELLA HISTIDINE OPERATOR-PROMOTER

Bert Ely ¹, David B. Fankhauser ¹, and Philip E. Hartman ¹

¹ Department of Biology, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218

Over 100 regulatory mutations linked to the histidine (his) operon of S. typhimurium have been isolated. They all map in a region estimated to be several hundred base pairs in length located at one end of the his operon ("the hisO region"). The mutations are located at sixteen recombinationally separable sites or are deletions encompassing several sites. Data obtained from pairs of reciprocal three-point tests show that "constitutive" (high enzyme levels) and "promoter-like" (low enzyme levels) hisO mutations are interspersed on the genetic map. In a few crosses, recombination was not observed to occur between markers shown to occupy different sites based on behavior in other recombination tests.