No-Go Zones for Mariner Transposition

The property of transposons to randomly insert into target DNA has long been exploited for generalized mutagenesis and forward genetic screens. Newer applications that monitor the relative abundance of each transposon insertion in large libraries of mutants can be used to evaluate the roles in cellular fitness of all genes of an organism, provided that transposition is in fact random across all genes. In a recent article, Kimura and colleagues identified an important exception to the latter assumption [S. Kimura, T. P. Hubbard, B. M. Davis, M. K. Waldor, mBio 7(4):e01351-16, 2016, doi:10.1128/mBio.01351-16]. They provide evidence that the Mariner transposon exhibits locus-specific site preferences in the presence of the histone-like nucleoid structuring protein H-NS. This effect was shown to bias results for important virulence loci in Vibrio cholerae and to result in misidentification of genes involved in growth in vitro. Fortunately, the bulk of this bacterium’s genome was unaffected by this bias, and recognizing the H-NS effect allows filtering to improve the accuracy of the results.