Construction and properties of chimeric plasmids in Bacillus subtilis.

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Abstract
Antibiotic resistance chimeric plasmids were constructed by in vitro enzymatic manipulation and introduced into B. subtilis by transformation. The parental plasmids used were introduced into B. subtilis from Staphylococcus aureus by transformation. Of the 7 recombinant plasmids constructed using restriction endonucleases, 1 was made using EcoRI, another using Hpa II, and 5 with Xba (from Xanthomonas badrii), demonstrating the utility of the latter enzyme for molecular cloning experiments. Although all of the recombinant plasmids replicate and express their antibiotic resistance characters, 3 of them have suffered a loss of DNA in vitro or in vivo. The deletion event in all cases involved 1 of the 2 termini used to join the parental plasmids. The plasmid chimeras reported in this paper should prove useful for the study of plasmid replication, incompatibility and recombination. The utility of the B. subtilis system for molecular cloning was clearly illustrated.