Laboratoire de Microbiologie et Génétique Moléculaire UMR 5100, CNRS, 31062 Toulouse CEDEX, France. mike@ibcg.biotoul.fr
The sliding beta clamp subunit of the DNA replication machinery in the bacterium Escherichia coli coordinates multiple functions in the cell beyond genome duplication. In this issue, Parks et al. (2009) find that the beta clamp interacts with the transposition protein TnsE to target the Tn7 transposon to discontinuously replicating DNA at the replication fork.