New one-step pro­cess for design­er bacteria

The research­ers have developed a new one-step bac­teri­al genet­ic engin­eer­ing pro­cess called ​‘cloneteg­ra­tion’, pub­lished in the journ­al ACS Syn­thet­ic Bio­logy. Led by Dr Keith Shear­win, in the Uni­versity’s School of Molecu­lar and Bio­med­ic­al Sci­ences, the research facil­it­ates faster devel­op­ment of design­er bac­teria used in thera­peut­ic drug devel­op­ment, such as insulin, and oth­er bio­tech­no­logy products. Design­er bac­teria are pro­duced by integ­rat­ing extra pieces of genet­ic mater­i­al into the DNA of bac­teria, in this case E. coli, so that the bac­teria will make a desired product. ​“E. coli strains are com­monly used work­horses for bio­tech­no­logy and meta­bol­ic engin­eer­ing,” Dr Shear­win says. ​“For example, new genes or even the genet­ic mater­i­al for whole meta­bol­ic path­ways are inser­ted into the bac­teri­a’s chro­mo­some so that they pro­duce com­pounds or pro­teins not nor­mally pro­duced. Insulin is an example of a thera­peut­ic product pro­duced in this way. But the exist­ing pro­cess for integ­rat­ing new genes is inef­fi­cient, tak­ing sev­er­al days. Our new pro­cess can be com­pleted overnight.” As well as speed­ing up the pro­cess, ​‘cloneteg­ra­tion’ enables mul­tiple rounds of genet­ic engin­eer­ing on the same bac­teria, and sim­ul­tan­eous integ­ra­tion of mul­tiple genes at dif­fer­ent spe­cif­ic loc­a­tions. ​“This will become a valu­able tech­nique for facil­it­at­ing genet­ic engin­eer­ing with sequences that are dif­fi­cult to clone as well as enable the rap­id con­struc­tion of syn­thet­ic bio­lo­gic­al sys­tems,” Dr Shear­win says. The research was a col­lab­or­a­tion with Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, Cali­for­nia. The molecu­lar tools needed for the cloneteg­ra­tion pro­cess will be made freely avail­able for ongo­ing research and devel­op­ment.

Ori­gin­al publication:

One-Step Clon­ing and Chro­mo­somal Integ­ra­tion of DNA. François St-Pierre, Lun Cui, Dav­id G. Priest, Drew Endy, Ian B. Dodd and Keith E. Shear­win. Source: Uni­ver­sity of Adelaide