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Selection and characterization of a promoter for expression of single-copy recombinant genes in Gram-positive bacteria.

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posted on 2019-10-18, 14:07 authored by Roberta Provvedi, Tiziana Maggi, Marco R. Oggioni, Riccardo Manganelli, Gianni Pozzi
BACKGROUND: In the past ten years there has been a growing interest in engineering Gram-positive bacteria for biotechnological applications, including vaccine delivery and production of recombinant proteins. Usually, bacteria are manipulated using plasmid expression vectors. The major limitation of this approach is due to the fact that recombinant plasmids are often lost from the bacterial culture upon removal of antibiotic selection. We have developed a genetic system based on suicide vectors on conjugative transposons allowing stable integration of recombinant DNA into the chromosome of transformable and non-transformable Gram-positive bacteria. RESULTS: The aim of this work was to select a strong chromosomal promoter from Streptococcus gordonii to improve this genetic system making it suitable for expression of single-copy recombinant genes. To achieve this task, a promoterless gene encoding a chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (cat), was randomly integrated into the S. gordonii chromosome and transformants were selected for chloramphenicol resistance. Three out of eighteen chloramphenicol resistant transformants selected exhibited 100% stability of the phenotype and only one of them, GP215, carried the cat gene integrated as a single copy. A DNA fragment of 600 base pairs exhibiting promoter activity was isolated from GP215 and sequenced. The 5' end of its corresponding mRNA was determined by primer extention analysis and the putative -10 and a -35 regions were identified. To study the possibility of using this promoter (PP) for single copy heterologous gene expression, we created transcriptional fusions of PP with genes encoding surface recombinant proteins in a vector capable of integrating into the conjugative transposon Tn916. Surface recombinant proteins whose expression was controlled by the PP promoter were detected in Tn916-containing strains of S. gordonii and Bacillus subtilis after single copy chromosomal integration of the recombinant insertion vectors into the resident Tn916. The surface recombinant protein synthesized under the control of PP was also detected in Enterococcus faecalis after conjugal transfer of a recombinant Tn916 containing the transcriptional fusion. CONCLUSION: We isolated and characterized a S. gordonii chromosomal promoter. We demonstrated that this promoter can be used to direct expression of heterologous genes in different Gram-positive bacteria, when integrated in a single copy into the chromosome.

Funding

The work was supported in part by the European Commission grant QLK2-CT2000-00543 to GP, a grant from MIUR (COFIN 2002) to GP and from MIUR (FIRB RBAU01X9TB) to MRO.

History

Citation

BMC Biotechnology, 2005, volume 5, Article number: 3

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES/Biological Sciences/Genetics and Genome Biology

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

BMC Biotechnology

Publisher

BMC (part of Springer Nature)

eissn

1472-6750

Acceptance date

2005-01-14

Copyright date

2005

Available date

2019-10-18

Publisher version

https://bmcbiotechnol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6750-5-3

Language

en