By Baiyang Liu and James Chappell, Rice University. For decades, we’ve been designing experiments around two major limitations of plasmids: copy number and incompatibility. While functional, such workarounds are clunky. To address this, we created a synthetic origin of ...
Promoters control the binding of RNA polymerase and transcription factors. Since the promoter region drives transcription of a target gene, it therefore determines the timing of gene expression and largely defines the amount of recombinant protein that will be produced. Many ...
Originally published Feb 6, 2014 and last updated Nov 10, 2020. Now that we know all about antibiotic resistance genes, let’s consider another basic element of any plasmid: the origin of replication/replicon. The replicon is comprised of the origin of replication (ori) and all ...
Members of the bacterial world produce an assortment toxins to claim territory or kill competing microorganisms, but did you know bacteria also produce substances toxic to themselves? What are toxin-antitoxin systems? These toxic substances are part of toxin-antitoxin systems ...
Researchers express genes of interest from plasmids in order to study gene function or to engineer cells for specific purposes. Unfortunately, plasmid copy numbers vary within cell populations and over time resulting in variable gene expression that can impact observed ...
This post was contribued by guest bloggers Aline and Benjamin Glick from SnapGene. SnapGene was created to meet a need. While there were software tools available to biomedical researchers manipulating DNA sequences on a daily basis, many found these tools inadequate for ...
Plasmids designed to express genes in a given host cell type are generally broken down into two broad categories, prokaryotic or eukaryotic, based on the functional elements they contain. Plasmid DNA in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems must be transcribed into RNA, which ...
