Eukaryotic gene invasion by a bacterial mobile insertion sequence element IS2 during cloning into a plasmid vector

Escherichia coli (E. coli) are commonly used as hosts for DNA cloning and sequencing. Upon transformation of E. coli with recombined vector carrying a gene of interest, the bacteria multiply the gene of interest while maintaining the integrity of its content. During the subcloning of a mouse genomic fragment into a plasmid vector, we noticed that the size of the insert increased significantly upon replication in E. coli. The sequence of the insert was determined and found to contain a novel DNA sequence within the mouse genomic insert. A BLAST search of GenBank revealed the novel sequence to be that of the Insertion Sequence 2 (IS2) element from E. coli that was likely inserted during replication in that organism. Importantly, a detailed search of GenBank shows that the IS2 is present within many eukaryotic nucleotide sequences, and in many cases, has been annotated as being part of the protein. The results of this study suggest that one must perform additional careful analysis of the sequence results using BLAST comparisons, and further verification of gene annotation before submission into the GenBank.