Revision as of 09:17, 17 October 2021

pAdapted, a plasmid for the production of dNTP's

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Sequence and Features

Pfu encoding sequence with 6x histidine tag.

Description

This part was constructed for the project AdAPTED of iGEM Athens 2021. Its goal is to result in overexpression of RNR and TSase enzymes, when E. coli BL21 bacteria are transformed.

pGGA

This backbone contains a Chloramphenicol resistance gene under the control of a cat promoter. Additionally it contains a high-copy number ori and a SP6 promoter and a T7 promoter flanking two bsaI cut sites. Lastly, it contains two MCS between outside the two bsaI cut sites.

=TSase

Thymidylate synthase (TS), has the ability to bind with cellular RNA, forming a complex, which results in translational repression. In general, TS plays an important role in the regulation of the cell cycle, translation, chemosensitivity and apoptosis. Lastly, TS catalyzes the reduction of deoxyuridylate (dUMP) to thymidylate (dTMP), the only de novo method of dTMP production.
A three secondary stem - loop structure is observed, and this exact structure is hypothesized to influence the TS mRNA translation. With deletion of any one of these repeated sequences, the translational TS mRNA efficiency was altered. The secondary structure of TSase is also important for protein recognition.

Pfu variants

Since error rate is important to be minimum in a number of techniques, there are several attempts to improve Pfu polymerase in that aspect with most importantly the Phusion variant [6]. Pfu can be attached to Sso7d which is a 7 kDa protein originating from Sulfolobus solfataricus, a hyperthermophilic archaebacterium [7]. Fusion to Sso7d has been proven to increase processivity, enabling longer amplifications and greater amplification speed [8].

Isolation and Purification

Since Pfu is an important enzyme worldwide there have been reported many attempts to produce it and purify it. Originally Pfu polymerase was isolated directly from Pyrococcus furiosus, but growing this species is a challenge especially in large quantities [9]. Thus, it has been successfully attempted to express that enzyme in E. coli BL21 [10]. The purification of the protein has been done with many different ways like His-tag purification and with the use of weak cation exchange resins [11, 12]. Recently a new simple method utilizing the tolerance to heat of the enzyme has been used successfully introducing a new level of simplicity for isolation and purification of thermotolerant proteins [13].

Histidine Tag

In the Pfu encoding gene, a histidine tag is added to isolate the protein for future applications. Purification of Pfu using polyhistidine affinity tags was selected as it is a rapid and efficient method, resulting in 100-fold enrichment and up to 95% purities in a single purification step (Bornhorst et. al. 2000).