Evaluating Light-Induced Promoters for the Control of Heterologous Gene Expression in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803.

Cyanobacteria are enticing microbial factories, but little is understood how their gene control elements respond to the periodic availability to light. This research tested the capability of PpsbAII to control gene expression during light/dark conditions when moved to a neutral location within the Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 genome. When the eYFP reporter gene was run by PpsbAII in the promoter's native genomic location, mutants exposed to 12-hour light conditions experienced a 15.8× increase in transcript abundance over that observed from the same construct exposed to 12-hour dark conditions. When this same construct was moved to the hypothetical coding region slr0168 in the genome, transcripts generated during 12 hour light conditions accumulated to 1.67X of the levels of transcripts generated by the same construct during 12 hour dark conditions. Three additional promoter constructs, PpsbAIII , PgroEL2 , and PsigD were also tested for differential expression in light and dark conditions within the neutral region slr0168. While low amounts of transcript accumulation were observed from PgroEL2 and PsigD , the PpsbAIII construct accumulated 5.79× more transcripts when compared to transcript abundance during dark conditions, which highlights the potential of this promoter to control gene expression during diel-cycle light conditions. Additionally, nucleotide mutations were made to regions within PpsbAII . Mutations to the cis-acting hexo-nucleotide region increased expression 3.71× over that of the native promoter, while the addition of the "HLR" nucleotide region to the PpsbAII::ΔHex construct increased expression 2.76× over that of the native promoter. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog., 33:45-53, 2017.

Engineering of genetic control tools in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 using rational design techniques.

Cyanobacteria show promise as photosynthetic microbial factories capable of harnessing sunlight and CO2 to produce valuable end products, but few genetic control tools have been characterized and utilized in these organisms. To develop a suite of control elements capable of gene control at a variety of expression strengths, a library of 10 promoter-constructs were developed and built via rational design techniques by adding individual nucleotides in a step-wise manner within the -10 and -35 cis-acting regions of the tac promoter. This suite produced a dynamic range of expression strength, exhibiting a 78 fold change between the lowest expressing promoter, Psca8- and the highest expressing promoter, Psca3-2 when tested within Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. Additionally, this study details the construction of a chemically inducible construct for use in Synechocystis that is based on the tac repressor system most commonly used in Escherichia coli. This research demonstrates the construction of a highly expressed inducible promoter that is also capable of high levels of gene repression. Upon chemical induction with IPTG, this same mutant strain was capable of exhibiting an average 24X increase in GFP expression over that of the repressed state.

A novel counter-selection method for markerless genetic modification in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803.

The cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 is a photosynthetic organism capable of efficient harnessing of solar energy while capturing CO(2) from the environment. Methods to genetically alter its genomic DNA are essential for elucidating gene functions and are useful tools for metabolic engineering. In this study, a novel counter-selection method for the genetic alteration of Synechocystis was developed. This method utilizes the nickel inducible expression of mazF, a general protein synthesis inhibitor, as a counter-selection marker. Counter-selection is particularly useful because the engineered strain is free of any markers which make further genetic modification independent of available antibiotic resistance genes. The usability of this method was further demonstrated by altering genes at several loci in two variants of Synechocystis.