A new self-sustained terminal protein- primed DNA amplification system has been used to describe in vitro evolutionary changes affecting maintenance of the genome size of bacteriophage φ29. These changes involve generation and efficient amplification of short palindromic molecules containing an inverted duplication of one of the original DNA ends. A template-switching mechanism is pro- posed to account for the appearance of these molecules. After their formation, they would replicate by means of hairpin intermediates.
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