Stability and gene strand bias of lambda prophages and chromosome organization in Escherichia coli

Temperate phage-mediated horizontal gene transfer is a potent driver of genetic diversity in the evolution of bacteria. Most lambdoid prophages in E. coli are integrated into the chromosome with the same orientation with respect to the direction of chromosomal replication, and their location on the chromosome is far from homogeneous. To understand better these features, we studied the interplay between lysogenic and lytic states of phage lambda in both native and inverted integration orientations, at the wild-type integration site, as well as at other sites on the bacterial chromosome. Measurements of free phage released by spontaneous induction showed that the stability of lysogenic states is affected by location and orientation along the chromosome, with stronger effects near the origin of replication. Competition experiments and range expansions between lysogenic strains with opposite orientations and insertion loci indicated that there are no major differences in growth. Using singl..., , , # Stability and gene strand bias of lambda prophages and chromosome organization in Escherichia coli \[Dataset]

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zgmsbcck8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zgmsbcck8)

Deposited data includes the following data files used to generate different figures in the main text, with their respective description. Files of .opju type can be opened with OriginPro software (OriginLab Corporation).

**Distributions of cI and gal transcripts in Figs. 2 and S1** **measured in different genetic backgrounds.** Origin file containing the smFISH data used to generate the histograms in Figs. 2 and S1 for the indicated experiments. The name of the workbooks denotes the figure of the respective normalized histograms. For each strain, the calculated mean and standard error (SE) per bin are given.

**Flow cytometry of labelled lysogenic *E. coli* strains with lambda prophage integrated at the wild‐type *attB* site (17.4’) in Fig. 3**. The data used to plot Fig. 3, in the workbook F...