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Team:BIOSINT Mexico/Chassis
From 2014.igem.org
Arabidopsis - standar chassis in iGEM
Description
In biotechnology plants are mainly used for premeditation, for the obtainment of industrial products and to generate energy. For these reasons plant manipulation is a focus area in biological engineering. Unfortunately there is not a wide variety of plants projects in iGEM, one reason it's the lack of information in the registry of these organisms.
Arabidopsis thaliana is a model organism that was previously described as chassis. In iGEM 2010, Harvard team use this plant to test their designed vectors for Agrobacterium tumefaciens;
Compared with other organisms used as models, the proportion of A. thaliana proteins have related counterparts in Eukaryota genomes, these varies by a factor of 2 to 3, depending on the functional category. Only 8-23% of A. thaliana proteins involved in transcription have related genes in other Eukaryota genomes, reflecting the independent evolution of many plant transcription factors.
In contrast, 48-60% of genes involved in protein synthesis have counterpart in other eukaryota genomes, reflecting highly conserved gene functions. The relatively high proportion of matches between A. thaliana and bacterial proteins in the categories “metabolism” and “energy” reflects, both, the acquisition of bacterial genes from the ancestor of the plastid and high conservation of sequences across all species.
Advantages
- Arabidopsis Thaliana is one of the first eukaryotic experimental model organism.
- The knowledge recollect in this plant can be applied in others organism as animals and eukaryota.
- It allows working with any part of the plant, seeds, leaves, root, flowers.
- It has a short life that make it easy to laboratory work.
- The self-reproduction makes it possible to obtain large population of seedlings for specific characteristic or phenotype.
- Small genome (114.5 Mb/125 Mb total) has been sequenced in the year 2000.
- Genetic and physical maps of all 5 chromosomes.
- A rapid life cycle (about 6 weeks from germination to mature seed).
- Prolific seed production and easy cultivation in restricted space.
- Efficient transformation methods utilizing Agrobacterium tumefaciens.
- A large number of mutant lines and genomic resources many of which are available from Stock Centers.
- Multinational research community of academic, government and industry laboratories.
Disadvantages
- Does not growth faster as bacteria.
- There are not many parts available for plants in the registry.
- Transforming with Agrobacterium tumefaciens T-DNA integrates less randomly into the plant genome.
- High probabilities of pollution in the medium.
How to use Arabidopsis thaliana?
Successful germination and plant growth requires appropriate soil moisture, nutrient levels, light intensity, humidity, and temperature. If any of these are compromised, A. thaliana will respond by flowering early and dying prematurely and producing little leaf mass for experiments. The plants can also be stressed by overcrowding, fungus infestation, or insect infestation. All these factors must be conscientiously monitored to ensure reliable data obtained from experiments using these plants. Maintenance of soil moisture is imperative for successful seed germination.
The optimal temperature for plant growth is 25°C, with lower temperatures being allowable; higher temperatures can be very detrimental, particularly in the first two weeks of growth.
