The replication terminus region (31 to 35 min) of the Escherichia coli chromosome contains very few mapped genes (two per min) compared with the remainder of the chromosome, and much of the DNA appears dispensable. In order to determine whether, despite this, the terminus region consists of protein-coding sequences, we cloned 44 kb (1 min) of terminus region DNA (that surrounding trg at 31.4 min) and examined its ability to catalyze protein synthesis in vitro or in minicells. We were able to account for more than half the coding capacity of the cloned DNA with proteins synthesized in these systems, indicating that the sparsity of mapped genes in the terminus region does not result from a lack of identifiable coding sequences. We can therefore conclude that the terminus region is composed mainly of expressable, albeit inessential, proteinencoding genes. (6) which spans the 9-min region from 27 to 36 min enabled us to limit our cloning and screening to restriction fragments of known size.We report here our isolation and study of overlapping fragments of DNA representing nearly 1% of the chromosome (about 44 kb in total). This DNA and subclones prepared from it were either introduced on a plasmid vector into a minicell-producing strain and used to direct the synthesis of labelled polypeptides in purified minicells (32) or used as DNA in an in vitro protein-synthesizing system. Individually identified polypeptides were assigned to subsegments of the region, allowing us to account for close to 60% of total coding capacity. Our results show that a 1-min segment within the terminus region codes for a substantial number of polypeptides, indicating that the region as a whole, although dispensable by deletion and lacking genetic markers, nevertheless encodes a substantial number of polypeptides and thus cannot be said to be gene sparse. The functions of these genes remain to be discovered, but the terminus region remains distinctly different from the rest of the chromosome in that it encodes so large a number of apparently inessential proteins and no essential ones.