Team:Marburg/Part Collection

Part Collection

We gladly present to you our unique chloroplast-based OpenPlast part collection, that successfully complements and strongly enriches the plastid engineering field with the essential synthetic gene-coding and various regulatory parts. Unfortunately, there is a huge lack of properly characterized genetic parts in the plant research area across the borders of the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts. After a detailed analysis of the collection of over 20.000 BioBricks placed in the iGEM registry, we managed to find only 18 BioBrick parts that were intended to be used in the chloroplasts, although they had no proper description or data included next to them. At present, only a very limited number of suitable chloroplast-based regulatory elements are available for routine use, therefore more elaborate engineering projects are not possible considering this limitation.

With all this in mind, we proudly present the 2nd expansion of the Marburg collection[1].

The Marburg collection is a Golden Gate based toolbox containing various parts that are compatible with the PhytoBrick system and MoClo. Compared to other bacterial toolboxes, the Marburg Collection shines with superior flexibility. This unique set of genetic parts overcame the rigid paradigm of plasmid construction - thinking in fixed backbone and insert categories - by achieving complete de novo assembly of plasmids. 36 connectors facilitate flexible cloning of multigene constructs and even allow for the inversion of individual transcription units. The original Marburg Collection contains 123 parts in total, including: inducible promoters, reporters, fluorescence and epitope tags, ORIs, resistance cassettes and genome engineering tools. The toolbox was constructed as a foundation for future iGEM teams to empower accelerated progress in their ambitious projects.

Our new OpenPlast part collection includes 157 Golden Gate based genetic parts. Among parts from the chloroplast of Nicotiana tabacum, we built different genetic units from the chloroplast of Spinacia oleracea, Oryza sativa, Triticum aestivum and Quercus robur as well. From 157 new OpenPlast collection parts, 83 are designed for the tobacco chloroplasts, 23 for the rice chloroplast, 11 for the chloroplast of wheat, another 10 for the spinach chloroplast and 3 parts are designed from plant viruses. In addition, our collection contains a T7 promoter, as well as 9 different reporters, 8 of which have been codon optimised for the tobacco chloroplast and one for the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii chloroplast. All these parts can be easily used across the different plant species. With our contribution, we aim to accelerate research in the field of plastid engineering and to facilitate research work for many scientists working in the field of plant synthetic biology.

Part Overview



In order to get an overview on the toolbox, click on the icons in the syntax in order to see a table with all parts in the respective position.

Sources

  1. Stukenberg, D., Hensel, T., Hoff, J., Daniel, B., Inckemann, R., Tedeschi, J. N., Nousch, F., & Fritz, G. (2021). The Marburg Collection: A Golden Gate DNA Assembly Framework for Synthetic Biology Applications in Vibrio natriegens. In ACS Synthetic Biology (Vol. 10, Issue 8, pp. 1904–1919). American Chemical Society (ACS). https://doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.1c00126