Austin_UTexas

The Improved Blue Chromoprotein

Chromoproteins are known to be unstable, meaning that they create a high metabolic burden on the cell that they are in. In order to combat this metabolic burden, a technique called codon optimization was used. Codon optimization involves exchanging certain codons for ones that have known to be more translationally efficient in a certain species while retaining the same sequence of amino acids. Making translation more efficient, in turn, lowers the metabolic burden on the E.coli that the gene is present in. Therefore codon optimization greatly improves the function of the original blue chromoprotein (BBa_K592009). The codon optimized sequence has been transformed into a plasmid with the pSB1C3 backbone with the K608002 promoter and RBS sequence and also has been sequence verified to be the correct nucleotide sequence. Another improvement of this part is that the miniprepped sequence now has the promoter and RBS sequence attached to it, which can be taken and transformed immediately instead of having to go through the process of digestion and ligation all over again to add different parts to it.

The codon optimized blue chromoprotein composite part can be found on the iGEM registry as: BBa_K2253002.

Figure 1. The image above shows the transformation plate of the electroporation of the codon optimized blue chromoprotein. The blue colony shown was used to make overnight cultures to miniprep and sequence.

Figure 2. The overnight culture of the phenotypically blue colony from the codon optimized blue chromoprotein transformation.