Many pathogenic strains of Clostridium perfringens carry several highly similar toxin or
antibiotic resistance plasmids that have 35 to 40 kb of very closely related syntenous
sequences, including regions that carry the genes encoding conjugative transfer, plasmid
replication and plasmid maintenance functions. Key questions are how are these closely
related plasmids stably maintained in the same cell and what is the basis for plasmid
incompatibility in C. perfringens. Comparative analysis of the Rep proteins encoded by …