Difference between revisions of "Team:Valencia UPV/Design"

Biological Design: The Golden Braid Assembly

We are continuously talking about a machine which can create its own genetic circuits, by using pre-designed parts, and ‘print’ them inside different living cell chassis. But how is Printeria going to perform all these complex reactions?

One of the first attempts to standardize a restriction enzyme-based DNA assembly method was BioBricks (1). However, its pairwise nature can make the construction of multipart systems, such as transcriptional units, time-consuming.

Printeria is using a state-of-the-art technology based on the Golden Gate Assembly, the Golden Braid Assembly Method. This technology uses type IIs restriction enzymes in order to cut all the parts and build these genetic circuits.

The Golden Gate assembly is based on type IIs enzymes. But what does this really mean?

Type IIs restriction enzymes are a group of endonucleases that recognize asymmetric double stranded DNA sequences and cleave outside of their recognition sequence. Thus, digestion leaves short single stranded overhangs with non-specific sequences.

This allows us to design the cleaving region so that we are creating a sticky end that will be pasted with the following part, and so on. This is the way in which directionality is maintained and parts are pasted in the desired order.

But why is this assembly technique so crucial for our machine to work?