Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 111, Issue 48, Pages 17003-17010Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414399111
Keywords
telomerator; chromosome engineering; telomeric silencing; Sc2.0; synthetic chromosome
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [MCB-0718846]
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [N66001-12-C-4020]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Div Of Molecular and Cellular Bioscience [1443299] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Chromosome engineering is a major focus in the fields of systems biology, genetics, synthetic biology, and the functional analysis of genomes. Here, we describe the telomerator, a new synthetic biology device for use in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The telomerator is designed to inducibly convert circular DNA molecules into mitotically stable, linear chromosomes replete with functional telomeres in vivo. The telomerator cassette encodes convergent yeast telomere seed sequences flanking the I-SceI homing endonuclease recognition site in the center of an intron artificially transplanted into the URA3 selectable/counter-electable auxotrophic marker. We show that inducible expression of the homing endonuclease efficiently generates linear molecules, identified by using a simple plate-based screening method. To showcase its functionality and utility, we use the telomerator to circularly permute a synthetic yeast chromosome originally constructed as a circular molecule, synIXR, to generate 51 linear variants. Many of the derived linear chromosomes confer unexpected phenotypic properties. This finding indicates that the telomerator offers a new way to study the effects of gene placement on chromosomes (i.e., telomere proximity). However, that the majority of synIXR linear derivatives support viability highlights inherent tolerance of S. cerevisiae to changes in gene order and overall chromosome structure. The telomerator serves as an important tool to construct artificial linear chromosomes in yeast; the concept can be extended to other eukaryotes.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available