Synthetic 5' UTR Expression Profiling

Published: 14 September 2017| Version 1 | DOI: 10.17632/m4t56sz5vn.1
Contributors:
, Leon Anavy,

Description

We use an oligonucleotide library of >10000 variants to identify an insulation mechanism encoded within a subset of σ54 promoters. Insulation manifests itself as reduced protein expression for a downstream gene that is expressed by transcriptional read-through. It is strongly associated with the presence of short CT-rich motifs (3-5 bp), positioned within 25 bp upstream of the Shine-Dalgarno (SD) motif of the silenced gene. We provide evidence that insulation is triggered by binding of the ribosome binding site (RBS) to the upstream CT-rich motif. We also show that in E.coli insulator sequences are preferentially encoded within σ54 promoters, suggesting an important regulatory role for these sequences in natural contexts. Our findings imply that sequence-specific regulatory effects that are sparsely encoded by short motifs may not be easily detected by lower throughput studies. Such sequence-specific phenomena can be uncovered with a focused OL design that mitigates sequence related variance, as exemplified herein.

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Institutions

Technion Israel Institute of Technology

Categories

Synthetic Biology, Gene Regulation

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