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Team:MIT/Cre
From 2013.igem.org
Overview of Cre Recombinase
Taken from from the P1 Bacteriophage, Cre recombinase is widely used as a site specific DNA recombinase. The protein functions by binding to LoxP as a dimer, then two bound dimers coming together as a tetramer, creating a Holiday Junction, and finally breaking, recombining, and re-ligating the DNA back together.One useful property of Cre recombinase is its ability to recombine DNA at very low concentrations of active protein. Since the ultimate goal is to send Cre recombinase through exosomes, the amount of Cre recombinase entering the sender cell will likely be small, but as mentioned earlier, that shouldn't be a problem, as it doesn't take very many Cre molecules to trigger a recombination event.
Characterization
Before we can consider fusing Cre recombinase to Acyl-TyA, we must first determine that we can get unmodified Cre recombinase functioning in single cells, and second, determine that the Acyl-TyA-Cre fusion protein functions as well. The diagram below demonstrates how Cre recombinase activity will be assayed. When the reporter construct is transfected into cells, it produces red fluorescence, but when Cre recombinase is present, the LoxP sites flanking the RFP gene causes it to be spliced out by Cre and the reporter shifts from producing red fluorescence to producing green fluorescence from the GFP gene.
The Circuit
