SynBERC:MIT/Calendar/2007-8-8

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Anyone in the synthetic biology community is welcome to attend.

Wednesday August 8, 2007 at 12:30pm EST

32-D463, MIT

Topic of discussion

Jason Kelly will be leading a discussion on how do we make BioBricks more useful for academic research labs. In this discussion, we will also be generating a list of "wanted" BioBrick parts.

Wanted parts

• Expression biobrick plasmids
  • T7 promoter - may have patent issues but it has been tried and tested.
  • T3
  • SP6
  • T7 RNA polymerase containing strains
  • also T3, SP6 What are the patent issues on these?

• Popular plasmids
  • Any requests through the SynBERC BB plasmid project? (Collin)

• xre protein, promoters (subtilis)

• antibiotic cassettes
  • Apramycin
  • Trimethoprim

• Transposase genes

• Plasmid origins
  • R6, P1, F, colE1

• chomosomal integration fragments
  • choice of locations on the chromosome

• cell killing enzymes
  • VSVG

• protein export tags
  • phoA
• protein purification tags, antibody epitopes
  • FLAG
  • 6HIS - Sauer lab
  • Strep
  • GST
  • Chitin binding
  • MBP
  • S tags (is this the same as strep?)

• protein solubility
  • maltose binding protein

• protein splicing domains

• surface display proteins
  • LPP/OmpA
  • Neisseria IgA1

• New fluorescent proteins
  • EBFP2 blue
  • new red monomers

• luminescent reporters
  • renilla
  • photuris
  • bacterial (Photorhabdus)

• Promoters in reverse direction

• Parts to enable custom insertions in the middle of devices (e.g. a set of alternate restriction sites that are also kept out of BBs (and BB plasmids) when possible to support using them for editing)

• the pZE modular plasmid system - Stephanopoulous lab - should be covered by vector scaffold ... BBa_I51001

• Gateway cloning system

• BioBrick every gene

• Add your wanted part here ...

Live Notes

Rocking the notetaking:

• Audience: Asking about creating a 5-gene operon, something to do with the PZE system, interested in using BB methods to build permutations of the transcription logic

• Audience: GST tags are key for surface plasmon resonance

Question: how do people keep track of plasmids and their constructs?

Problem: right now people do not have a way to import or export annotated sequence files from the registry.

Jason: one of the most useful functions of the Registry is documentation and archival of parts.

The Sauer lab just uses a notepad to keep track of plasmids.

We need better education about the ease of assembling pieces of DNA via BioBricks assembly. This should also involve statistics on assembly success rate.

The Registry could offer to BioBrick existing vectors that labs are using.