Vibrigens - Accelerating Synbio:
Establishing Vibrio natriegens as the new chassis organism for synthetic biology
Waiting for cells to grow is an enormous time sink for synthetic biologists. Cloning cycles with
the current standard, Escherichia coli, typically take up to three days. In our project Vibrigens
- Accelerating Synbio, we established the tools to turn Vibrio natriegens into the next
generation chassis for synthetic biology, ready to be used reliably. By taking advantage of its
unbeaten doubling time of 7 minutes, we substantially reduced waiting time and made oneday-cloning a reality. We built and characterized a flexible golden-gate-based part collection,
consisting of more than 100 parts, which enables the creation of complex pathways in a short
amount of time. Our engineered V. natriegens strains VibriClone and VibriExpress are
designed for cloning and protein expression applications, respectively. Moreover, we
established the first synthetic metabolic pathway in this organism by producing the platform
chemical 3-Hydroxypropionate and along the way developed an accelerated workflow for
metabolic engineering.
