Analysis of mutagenesis induced by expression of retroviral reverse transcriptase in Escherichia coli.

We showed that expression of reverse transcriptase from HIV or MuLV resulted in exceptionally high levels of mutagenesis in E coli. We observed high rates of mutagenesis in plasmid genes when reverse transcriptase was expressed off that plasmid. Although very high rates were observed in cis, our experiments could not detect mutagenic events in markers in other replicons (ie in trans). These results suggest mutagenic events occur preferentially on the same replicon in which the reverse transcriptase is encoded.