Codon reassignment to facilitate genetic engineering and biocontainment in the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

ABSTRACT: There is a growing interest in the use of microalgae as low-cost hosts for the synthesis of recombinant products such as therapeutic proteins and bioactive metabolites. In particular, the chloroplast, with its small, genetically tractable genome (plastome) and elaborate metabolism, represents an attractive platform for genetic engineering. In Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, none of the 69 protein-coding genes in the plastome uses the stop codon UGA, therefore this spare codon can be exploited as a useful synthetic biology tool. Here, we report the assignment of the codon to one for tryptophan and show that this can be used as an effective strategy for addressing a key problem in chloroplast engineering: namely, the assembly of expression cassettes in Escherichia coli when the gene product is to

SUBMITTER: Young RE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5102678 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature