A method for determination of the synthesis rate of stable and unstable ribonucleic acid in Escherichia coli

✍ Scribed by Patrick P. Dennis; Hans Bremer

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1973
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 748 KB
• Volume: 56
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-2697
• DOI: 10.1016/0003-2697(73)90216-9

✦ Synopsis

A method to determine the relative rates of stable and unstable RNA synthesis is presented. The method employs the antibiotic rifampicin. For exponential phase Escherichia coli B/r growing at rates between 0.67 and 2.10 doublings per hr (3.2-fold range in growth rate), the fraction of the instantaneous rate of total RNA synthesis which is stable RNA was found to increase 2.3-fold (with increasing growth rate) from 0.29 to 0.68. Correspondingly, the fraction of the instantaneous rate of RNA synthesis which is unstable and presumably mRNA, decreases from 0.71 to 0.32 over this growth rate range.

These relative synthesis rates are in good agreement with values obtained by DNA-RNA hybridization and other methods reported in the literature. The new method is simpler than these other methods and presumably a.9 accurate.