发布: 2020年02月20日第10卷第4期 DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3528 浏览次数: 4623
评审: Dennis J Nürnberg Cheng Cai ZhangAnonymous reviewer(s)
Abstract
Anabaena sp. PCC 7120 (hereafter Anabaena) is a model cyanobacterium to study nitrogen fixation, cellular differentiation and several other key biological functions that are analogous in plants. As with any other organism, many genes in Anabaena encode an essential life function and hence cannot be deleted, causing a bottleneck in the elucidation of its genomic function. Antisense RNA (asRNA) mediated approach renders the study of essential genes possible by suppressing (but not completely eliminating) expression of the target gene, thus allowing them to function to some extent. Recently, we have successfully implemented this approach using the strong endogenous promoter of the psbA1 gene (D1 subunit of Photosystem II) introduced into a high-copy replicative plasmid (pAM1956) to suppress the transcript level of the target gene alr0277 (encoding a sigma factor, SigJ/Alr0277) in Anabaena. This protocol represents an efficient and easy procedure to further explore the functional genomics, expanding the scope of basic and applied research in these ecologically important cyanobacteria.
Keywords: AntisenseRNA (asRNA) (反义RNA)Background
Cyanobacteria, a diverse phylum of aerobic bacteria capable of photosynthesis, require light (solar energy), carbon dioxide and trace elements for growth. They are genetically amenable due to the availability of facile molecular biology techniques and efficient conjugation systems for the transfer of foreign genes into them (Wolk et al., 1984; Elhai et al., 1997). Anabaena is a filamentous cyanobacterium, which is capable of cellular differentiation, wherein specialised cells (termed heterocysts) carry out nitrogen fixation. Classical strategies such as gene knockout to disrupt the function of a “gene of interest” have been widely employed in cyanobacteria in order to understand their function. Following transformation, segregation of the polyploid genome is required to obtain homozygous mutants. In the case of many essential genes (for example, GroEL, LexA), however, the mutants are not viable or cannot segregate completely as the target protein is essential for its survival (Rajaram and Apte, 2008; Kumar et al., 2018). In such cases, an option is to knockdown the genes of interest by targeting them using asRNA (Blanco et al., 2011; Lin et al., 2013) or dCas9-based CRISPR approaches (Tian et al., 2017), and then study the down-regulated/knockdown phenotype.
The dCas9-based approach has its own limitations, for example, in some organisms, expression of the dCas9 protein may be toxic to cells wherein it is expressed (Lee et al., 2016; Zhang and Voigt, 2018). The reason for the toxicity of Cas9 in cyanobacteria remains unclear, nonetheless recently the employment of a novel RNA directed dsDNA nuclease Cpf1 from Francisella novicida showed far less toxicity in cyanobacteria (Ungerer and Pakrasi, 2016; Niu et al., 2018). Although CRISPR-based gene editing approaches are being rapidly optimized, they need further development to be efficiently used in future cyanobacterial gene knockdown procedures. In such cases, it would be more fruitful to use another methodology such as asRNA to create knockdown strains. The asRNA, which is the complement of its respective mRNA, binds specifically to the mRNA (i.e., forms a dsRNA), thereby reducing its ability to be translated by the ribosomal machinery. Due to decreased translation, a reduction in expression of the desired protein (knockdown) is achieved. Recently, we have used asRNA-mediated approach to downregulate a sigma factor SigJ (Alr0277) by using native psbA1 promoter for expression of asRNA and achieved a 3-fold reduction in the sigJ transcript (Srivastava et al., 2017). Similarly, this approach was also employed to downregulate in vivo expression of the Alr3183 protein (an atypical 2 cysteine-containing thiol peroxidase) in Anabaena (Tailor and Ballal, 2017). Here we present the detailed protocol to knockdown genes in Anabaena for applications in basic as well as applied research.
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文章信息
版权信息
© 2020 The Authors; exclusive licensee Bio-protocol LLC.
如何引用
Srivastava, A., Ballal, A., Forchhammer, K. and Tripathi, A. K. (2020). Construction of Antisense RNA-mediated Gene Knock-down Strains in the Cyanobacterium Anabaena sp. PCC 7120. Bio-protocol 10(4): e3528. DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3528.
分类
植物科学 > 植物分子生物学 > DNA
生物化学 > DNA > 单分子活性
分子生物学 > DNA > 诱/突变
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