Bacterial chromosome segregation.

In most bacteria two vital processes of the cell cycle: DNA replication and chromosome segregation overlap temporally. The action of replication machinery in a fixed location in the cell leads to the duplication of oriC regions, their rapid separation to the opposite halves of the cell and the duplicated chromosomes gradually moving to the same locations prior to cell division. Numerous proteins are implicated in co-replicational DNA segregation and they will be characterized in this review. The proteins SeqA, SMC/MukB, MinCDE, MreB/Mbl, RacA, FtsK/SpoIIIE playing different roles in bacterial cells are also involved in chromosome segregation. The chromosomally encoded ParAB homologs of active partitioning proteins of low-copy number plasmids are also players, not always indispensable, in the segregation of bacterial chromosomes.