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Renaturation kinetics of labeled Agrobacterium tumefaciens DNA are not influenced by addition of 10(4)-fold excess of crown gall tumor DNA. Reconstruction experiments demonstrated that 0.01% added bacterial DNA produces a detectable increase in rate of renaturation of labeled DNA. Crown gall tumor DNA therefore cannot contain as much as 0.01% A. tumefaciens DNA (one entire bacterial genome per three diploid tumor cells). By the same technique, PS8 bacteriophage DNA is not detected in crown gall tumor DNA under conditions that allow detection of 0.0007-0.001% added phage DNA. Crown gall tumor DNA cannot contain as much as one entire phage genome per diploid tumor cell. The presence of a small fraction of either genome (less than 5%), even if present as multiple copies, would escape detection by this method.
Chilton et al. (Sun,) studied this question.