DnaA Boxes

Initiation of replication

In the rest of this section, we’ll focus on the relatively easy case of finding ori in bacterial genomes, most of which consist of a single circular chromosome. Research has shown that the region of the bacterial genome encoding ori is typically a few hundred nucleotides long. Our plan is to begin with a bacterium in which ori is known and then determine what makes this genomic region special in order to design a computational approach for finding ori in other bacteria. Our example is Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera; here’s the nucleotide sequence appearing in its ori: