Regulation of transcription by unnatural amino acids

Small-molecule regulation of gene expression is intrinsic to cellular function and indispensable to the construction of new biological sensing, control and expression systems. However, there are currently only a handful of strategies for engineering such regulatory components and fewer still that ca...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature biotechnology 2011-02, Vol.29 (2), p.164-168
Main Authors: Liu, Chang C, Arkin, Adam P, Qi, Lei, Yanofsky, Charles
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/208/200
631/337/572
631/61/185
Agriculture
Amino acids
Amino Acids - metabolism
Binding sites
Bioinformatics
Biological and medical sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedical Engineering/Biotechnology
Biomedicine
Biotechnology
Codon
Escherichia coli - genetics
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Gene expression
Gene Expression Regulation, Bacterial
Genetic aspects
Genetic regulation
Genetic transcription
letter
Life Sciences
Models, Genetic
Peptides
Physiological aspects
Recombinant proteins
Regulatory Elements, Transcriptional
Spectrometry, Fluorescence
Technology application
Transcription, Genetic
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Summary:Small-molecule regulation of gene expression is intrinsic to cellular function and indispensable to the construction of new biological sensing, control and expression systems. However, there are currently only a handful of strategies for engineering such regulatory components and fewer still that can give rise to an arbitrarily large set of inducible systems whose members respond to different small molecules, display uniformity and modularity in their mechanisms of regulation, and combine to actuate universal logics. Here we present an approach for small-molecule regulation of transcription based on the combination of cis-regulatory leader-peptide elements with genetically encoded unnatural amino acids (amino acids that have been artificially added to the genetic code). In our system, any genetically encoded unnatural amino acid (UAA) can be used as a small-molecule attenuator or activator of gene transcription, and the logics intrinsic to the network defined by expanded genetic codes can be actuated.
ISSN:1087-0156
1546-1696
DOI:10.1038/nbt.1741