Fig. 1

Overview over generated MAI and MAI-adjacent mutants in M. gryphiswaldense. Regions R1, R3, R5 and R7 indicate the five key operons (brown, green, violet, red, grey) for magnetosome biosynthesis while R2, R4, R6 and R8 represent intervening and MAI-adjacent regions. Grey bars show the extensions of successful deletions, while connecting lines indicate non-deleted parts. Magenta color highlights the strain ∆A13 from Lohße et al. (2011) which served as parental strain for ∆M01 and ∆M03. Dashed bars show attempted deletions which failed. Genes with irrelevant functions for magnetosome biosynthesis are shown as black arrows, and transposable elements are shown in blue. The yellow bar indicates the extent of deletion (~ 12.8 kb) that had not been covered by previous approaches [28, 29]. The genotype of the five contiguous magnetosome biosynthesis operons compact cassette pTpsMAG1 is shown in the lower line containing regions R1, R3, R5 and R7 (brown, green, violet, red, grey)