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In Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis replication fork arrest occurs in the terminus at sequence‐specific sites by the binding of replication terminator proteins to the fork arrest sites. The protein‐DNA complex causes polar arrest of the replication forks by inhibiting the activity of the replicative helicases in only one orientation of the terminus with respect to the replication origin. This activity has been named as polar contrahelicase. In this paper we report on a second novel activity of the terminator proteins of E.coli and B.subtilis, namely the ability of the proteins to block RNA chain elongation by several prokaryotic RNA polymerases in a polar mode. The replication terminator proteins ter and RTP of E.coli and B.subtilis respectively, impeded RNA chain elongation catalyzed by T7, SP6 and E.coli RNA polymerases in a polar mode at the replication arrest sites. The RNA chain anti‐elongation and the contrahelicase activities were isopolar. Whereas one monomer of ter was necessary and sufficient to block RNA chain elongation, two interacting dimers of RTP were needed to effect the same blockage. The biological significance of the RNA chain anti‐elongation activity is manifested in the functional inactivation of a replication arrest site by invasion of RNA chains from outside, and the consequent need to preserve replication arrest activity by restricting the passage of transcription through the terminus‐terminator protein complex.

The replication terminator protein (RTP) of Bacillus subtilis impedes replication fork movement in a polar mode upon binding as two interacting dimers to each of the replication termini. The mode of interaction of RTP with the terminus DNA is of considerable mechanistic significance because the DNA‐protein complex not only localizes the helicase‐blocking activity to the terminus, but also generates functional asymmetry from structurally symmetric protein dimers. The functional asymmetry is manifested in the polar impedance of replication fork movement. Although the crystal structure of the apoprotein has been solved, hitherto there was no direct evidence as to which parts of RTP were in contact with the replication terminus. Here we have used a variety of approaches, including saturation mutagenesis, genetic selection for DNA‐binding mutants, photo cross‐linking, biochemical and functional characterizations of the mutant proteins, and X‐ray crystallography, to identify the regions of RTP that are either in direct contact with or are located within 11 angstroms of the replication terminus. The data show that the unstructured N‐terminal arm, the alpha3 helix and the beta2 strand are involved in DNA binding. The mapping of amino acids of RTP in contact with DNA, confirms a ‘winged helix’ DNA‐binding motif.

The termination of DNA replication at a sequence‐specific replication terminus in Bacillus subtilis is catalyzed by a dimeric replication terminator protein (RTP) of subunit mol. wt 14,500. RTP has become an attractive protein with which to study the molecular mechanism of termination because its crystal structure has now been solved and the previous lack of an in vitro replication system has been largely overcome by our discovery that the protein terminates replication in vivo and in vitro in the well‐studied Gram‐negative Escherichia coli system. We have exploited the surrogate in vitro system to show that RTP acts as a polar contrahelicase to DnaB helicase of E. coli only when two RTP dimers are bound co‐operatively to overlapping core and auxiliary sequences comprising the terminus. A core sequence by itself binds one dimer of RTP, but elicits no contrahelicase activity. Binding of two RTP dimers to a tandem head‐to‐tail core repeat also elicits no contrahelicase activity, thus suggesting that a specific stereochemical interaction between two RTP dimers and with the terminator site is essential for termination. RTP blocks unwinding of DNA substrates containing heteroduplex regions that include the terminus and are in the size range of approximately 50 to > 1000 bp in length. Thus, the protein blocks authentic helicase‐catalyzed unwinding rather than just the translocation of the helicase on DNA.

We have isolated mutants of the pi initiator protein of the plasmid R6K that are defective in DNA looping in vitro but retain their normal DNA binding affinity for the primary binding sites (iterons) at the gamma origin/enhancer. One such looping defective mutant called R6 was determined to be a proline to leucine change at position 46 near the N terminus of the pi protein. Using a set of genetic assays that discriminate between the activation of the gamma origin/enhancer from those of the distantly located alpha and beta origins, we show that the looping defective initiator protein fails to activate the alpha and beta origins but derepresses initiation from the normally silent gamma origin in vivo. The results conclusively prove that DNA looping is required to activate distant replication origins located at distances of up to 3 kb from the replication enhancer.