Producing drugs at the precise location and time they are needed by having specific genes turn on and off in response to environmental cues would be a boon for synthetic biologists, but so far it has been difficult to design drugs that are precise enough for this type of delivery. In an effort to get closer to this goal, Rice University scientists have created a novel gene promoter library. According to their study, published in Nature Communications, this work offers predictable control over regulatory genetic components.
While natural promoters in the body tend to have variability in the amount expression that gets turned on or off, synthetic promoters require higher precision. To do this, the researchers developed a design scheme for creating promoters that turn on or off as much as needed.
Mathematicians from the University of Houston worked with the team to calculate some of the specific properties that would be needed for each building block. Based on this information, the building blocks were created and tested in Escherichia coli. The various building blocks were arranged to form a library of promoters, each designed to react in a specific way to chemical input.
"This paper provides a simple, cost-effective means of engineering promoters that provide user-defined dynamic ranges, which will enable the fine-tuning of the metabolic flux within synthetic biological and chemical circuits inside living cells," said Matthew Bennett, associate professor of biosciences at Rice and co-lead scientist of the new study.
Image: Escherichia coli. Image courtesy of the National Institutes of Health.