Sequence analysis of a cryptic plasmid from Flavobacterium sp. KP1, a psychrophilic bacterium.

A cryptic plasmid found at high copy number was isolated from Flavobacterium sp. KP1, a psychrophilic Gram-negative bacterium, cloned, and sequenced. The sequence will appear in the DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank databases under the accession number AB007196. The pFL1 plasmid is 2311 nucleotides in length with 32.7% GC content, and shows a distinctive nucleotide sequence without homology to other plasmids of similar length. The plasmid contains two open reading frames of significant length, ORFI and ORFII. ORFI encodes a protein similar to the replication proteins found in Gram-negative bacterial plasmids, Bacteroides fragilis plasmid pBI143 and Zymomonas mobilis plasmid pZM2. The putative translation product of ORFII shows homologies with plasmid recombination proteins found mainly in Gram-positive bacterial plasmids such as Staphylococcus aureus plasmid pT181.