Haas R, Meyer T F
Cell. 1986 Jan 17;44(1):107-15. doi: 10.1016/0092-8674(86)90489-7.
To investigate the significance of silent gene loci for pilus antigenic variation in N. gonorrhoeae, we determined the nucleotide sequence of the major silent locus, pilS1. The pilS1 locus contains six tandem pilus gene copies linked by a 39 bp repeat sequence also present in the expression loci. All silent copies lack the common N-terminal coding sequence of pilin, containing instead variant sequence information that constitutes a semivariable (SV) and a hypervariable (HV) domain. The SV and HV domains are interspersed with short, strictly conserved (C) regions flanking small cassettes of variable sequence information. It appears that such minicassettes from silent copies can be duplicated and transferred to other silent or expression genes by means of gene conversion.
为了研究沉默基因座在淋病奈瑟菌菌毛抗原变异中的意义，我们测定了主要沉默基因座pilS1的核苷酸序列。pilS1基因座包含六个串联的菌毛基因拷贝，这些拷贝由一个39bp的重复序列连接，该重复序列也存在于表达基因座中。所有沉默拷贝都缺乏菌毛蛋白常见的N端编码序列，取而代之的是包含半可变（SV）和高可变（HV）结构域的变异序列信息。SV和HV结构域散布着短的、严格保守的（C）区域，这些区域位于可变序列信息的小盒两侧。似乎来自沉默拷贝的这种小盒可以通过基因转换进行复制并转移到其他沉默或表达基因中。
