To run equimolar amounts of insert to vector the following table was calculated:

These gibson assemblies were then transformed into E.coli cells using electroporation with the voltage at 1.8kV and the exposure time ranging from 4.8ms to 5.2ms. The cells were then recovered at 37ºC for 1.5 hrs before 100 µl was plated onto KanR plates. These were left overnight at 37ºC.

Unfortunately, there were no colonies grown and as we have no product from our gibson assemblies remaining we will have to repeat the process from Week 1 in order to trouble-shoot the method and get the desired plasmid. It is possible that we accidentally swapped the primers or PCR products around at some point and thus we had 1A with 2B and 1B with 2A in the Gibson assembly. These combinations are not complementary and thus the Gibson would fail meaning that none of our bacteria received intact Kanamycin resistance in the transformation. However there are many other reasons why the process may have failed therefore we went through the entire method trying to cover all instances where we may have made an error.

First we confirmed that the primer sequences on the delivery tubes matched what we had ordered. We ran the PCR as before; we re-calculated the annealing temperatures and extension times with the same result as last week.

In week one, we did the DpnI digest after the Gibson assembly and not directly after the PCR. This time we did the digest immediately after the PCR to ensure that all template DNA was destroyed before running on the gel, ensuring cleaner bands on our gel and less contamination from non-PCR products.

We loaded 20 μl of each PCR product onto a 0.8% agarose gel as before. The resulting bands were visualized after staining as shown below:

The bands are not as bright as in the first attempt probably due to less time spent in the ethidium bromide staining tank. The bands correspond with the correct sized fragments as before. This suggests there was no error in the PCR reaction with the exception of again mixing up the primers (the PCR would be successful with any combination of the primers for a 1 and 2 reaction). The bands are cleaner allowing us to try an alternative to the gel extraction in case that caused our assembly and transformation to fail.

Next we excised and extracted our bands from the gel with the same QIAquick Gel Extraction Protocol protocol as before but with two changes. First we allowed additional drying time after the step involving ethanol supplemented buffer in case ethanol contamination inhibited the enzymes used in the Gibson assembly later in the process. We also replaced the 20 μl EB buffer with 20μl of MilliQ water. We did our second elution with the kit EB buffer. We then measured the concentration of DNA in each eluted sample using the nanodrop. This still gives us a reasonable idea (despite the interference from the remaining QG buffer residue) as to the amount of DNA in each sample from which to calculate our dilutions for the Gibson assembly reaction.

We used the remaining 10μl of our PCR products to do a Promega PCR clean-up and eluted using water. We gathered the following Nanodrop data:

Next we ran the following Gibson assembly reactions:

Next we transformed the Gibson assembly products into chemically competent E.coli cells. We decided to run a positive control for each kind of cell used using the pUC19 plasmid provided with the cells. Unfortunately we were limited with the amount of cells available and had to use two different cell strains; this resulted in some variation in the length of the first incubation with the DNA on ice as we began the transformation in the morning but then decided to pause the process so that the cells would be plated out later in the day in order to not have too much growth overnight. The NEB 5-alpha cells were also on ice slightly longer before the DNA was added.

The cells were plated out after 1.5 hour incubation. It was noted that one of the sample appeared to have leaked from the Eppendorf into the petri dish containing all the samples in the incubator. We think it was the 5-alpha control as this was the only sample that appeared to have lost volume. Samples 1-8 were plated on Kanamycin plates (i) that we made up during the final incubation period. The remaining sample was re-suspended in ~100μl of SOC to create a concentrated solution of cells that were also plated out on kanamycin plates (ii). The two controls were spread on Ampicillin plates made up by Nick. All plates were placed in the 37⁰c incubator overnight. The results in the morning were as follows:

Apart from the concentrated sample 1ii, none of the samples prepared using the gel extraction protocol grew. Sample 1ii also had limited growth compared to the other plates with colonies:

Samples 1i and 5i differed only in their clean-up method; 5i has lots of growth and 1i has none. This comparison holds true for Samples 2+6, 3+7 and 4+8 with the same result:

This suggests that we should use the Promega PCR clean-up kit and not the QIAquick Gel extraction. We will still run our samples on a gel to check the quality of our PCR reactions. We may investigate the Promega Gel extraction kit as this will enable us to pick our desired band out of a PCR that has also generated non-specific fragments which we cannot do with the Promega PCR clean-up protocol.

The samples that were treated with the master-mix and ligase supplied by Ciaran had more colonies than those that were treated with the NEB supplied master-mix as shown by the comparison between samples 5i and 7i:

This suggests that in future we should use the master-mix supplied by Ciaran.

All the controls grew showing that the lack of growth of samples 1- 4 was not due to inefficient transformation:

There was no observable difference between sample 8 and sample 7 which were treated the same but which used different chemically competent cells. Thus we can continue to use either the NEB 5-alpha or DH5-alpha chemically competent cells.

There was no observable difference between the samples that correspond to A Gibson assembly reactions (template for PCR primers and therefore fragment = pCM66) and those that correspond to B Gibson assembly reactions (PCR primers and therefore fragment include Pamp).

We picked colonies from the successful plates to grow up cultures overnight:

Week 3

We treated the resulting Gibson assembly products with a PCR clean-up (labelled resulting samples 6i and 8i respectively) and gel extraction (labelled resulting samples 6ii and 8ii respectively). We then transformed these samples into chemically competent NEB alpha-4 cells. Having allowed these to grow up overnight on kanamycin plates we had colonies on all four plates. This confirms that the transformation worked but does not confirm that our Gibson assembly reaction was successful. We will test this next week so the plates have been placed in the cold room to prevent too much growth.

Week 4

Tasks completed:

We grew up overnight liquid cultures of our Gibson assemblies. We extracted the plasmids from these samples (in order to get as much DNA as possible we used all the cells available resulting in several centrifugation steps to achieve a bacterial pellet before lysis). We eluted the each sample in only 30μl of elution buffer to concentrate the sample and the following NanoDrop data was acquired:

To test this theory we did a double restriction enzyme digest using HindIII and PstI using the following amounts and incubating at 37⁰c for an hour:

This further confirms our conclusion that our Gibson assembly reaction has failed and the vector backbone re-ligated without the insertion of the fragments. To ensure that none of our colonies had the complete construct we selected 12 more colonies from plates 6i and 6ii and grew them up in liquid culture with kanamycin overnight (labelled 1B-12B). We then extracted the plasmids from the cultures and repeated the same double restriction enzyme digest with HindIII and PstI. We however found the same result as before with only a single band running at ~5.5kb:

Sequencing data for samples 13-24 which potentially contain the pSRK-pdcmA-sfGFP construct came back as shown below:

Thus we will have to repeat the Gibson assembly for both our constructs. To this end we have used PCR to amplify the pME6010 Kan and pSRK Gm vector backbones, essentially repeating PCR reactions #6 and #8:

We will run a 2 hour DpnI digest on the resulting PCR products to ensure that there is none of the original template left. We will also run them very slowly on a gel to ensure maximum separation before excising the fragments and extracting them from the gel.

In addition to the above we made stocks of chemically competent MG155 E.coli cells to transform our plasmids into when we have succeeded in constructing them. We will make competent Pseudomonas stocks when we have our constructs completed as these need to be made only shortly before the actual transformation.

Weeks 1 and 2

Tasks completed:

We grew bacteria containing pUni-ABTUNJK (1) and pSB1C3-ABTUNJK (2) in LB overnight. The bacteria were pelleted by centrifugation (twice, to make sure there is no medium left during the purification steps. We used the Miniprep kits to extract each plasmid and then measured the DNA-concentration using used the Nanodrop with the following results:

In order to transform the plasmids we will be working with into Pseudomonas, we have generated liquid cultures of both Pseudomonas putida (KT2440)and Pseudomonas fluorescens (SBW25).

The next day, we have transformed the three plasmids listed below into both strains using the electroporation protocol for Pseudomonas:

We have collected the plates from the previous day and found out that there was bacterial growth on all plates. However, the Pseudomonas fluorescens strain formed a big bacterial lawn on the ampicillin-containing plate, which could potentially suggest that Pseudomonas fluorescens is inherently resistant to ampicillin. The most important result is the fact that we managed to transform the pUNI-ABTUNJK plasmid into P. putida, especially since pUNI is not a plasmid designed for Pseudomonas strains:

We have taken aliquots of the liquid cultures to generate frozen cultures according to our standard protocoll. However, we found a white precipitate in the liquid culture of P1 (Pseudomonas putida with the pUNI-plasmid). To make sure that this is not a contamination we generated five liquid cultures of P1 from the original plate to grow them overnight. Again, in all five replicates, we could see a white precipitate:

We are not entirely sure why the white precipitate forms, the plasmid might cause a stress response of the cell.

To test whether our Pseudomonas fluorescens strain is actually resistant to ampicillin, and whether there are any other resistances, we plated out both WT-strains on ampicillin, gentamicin, kanamycin, tetracycline and chloramphenicol-plates. In fact, the next day, we found Pseudomonas fluorescens growing on the ampicillin-plate and Pseudomonas putida growing on the chloramphenicol plate.

So far we have inserted the pUNI-plasmid containing the subunits for the microcompartment into P. putida. However, in order to test whether these subunits are in fact expressed in P. putida we prepared a western Blot by making a RAPID reducing buffer and a Blotting Buffer. We spun down 5mL aliquits of the liquid cell culture for 10 minutes at 2000rpm. After removing the supernatant, we resuspended the the pellet in the SDS-loading buffer. After freezing at -20°C for one hour and then boiling for 10 min. (to denature the proteins), we stored the samples ready for the Western blot in the -20°C freezer.

Week 3

Tasks completed:

Early this week we designed primers for inserting the wild-type dcmA gene and its upstream region into DM4.

In order to confirm our transformation of the pUNI-ABTUNJK into P. putida, we carried out a His-Tag In-Gel Stain of 3 samples of cultures grown overnight. This was followed by Coomassie staining to detect the total amount of protein present. While a large amount of protein was observed in the sample lanes, no clear bands were detectable

We also carried out a Western blot of the same 3 samples. Unfortunately, none of the sample lanes showed any chemiluminescence.

Week 4

Tasks completed:

Since expression of ABTUNJK microcompartments did not work with the pUNI vector in P. putida, we have redesigned primers to insert ABTUNJK into the pSRKGm vector. Our first attempt at PCR-amplificaiton of ABTUNJK and pSRKGm did not yield positive results, so we will repeat this next week with optimised settings.

Similarly, we have attempted to PCR-amplify the pCM66 vector in order to insert wild-type dcmA into it for hypermutagenic PCR. Unfortunately, this has not immediately yielded positive results so we have attempted another PCR-amplification again with slight variations of conditions, i.e. decreasing the annealing temperatures by 4°C. For the amplification of the pSRKGm vector, this has fortunately worked.

Finally, we have confirmed that last week's transformation of E. coli with the pUNI-ABTUNJK vector was successful by doing another western blot, as can be seen below: