Targeting the Anderson Promoters

After proving that our RiboTALs worked as transcription factors for an already inducible expression system with pTet upstream of our TALe binding sites corresponding to the TAL repressors used in our characterization experiments and a reporter, GFP, we decided to next target constitutive promoters that have no other form of inducible control. We are targeting the well characterized Anderson Promoter Family. With their known relative activities, we hope we can achieve predictable system responses from these promoters when placed upstream of GFP and under the control of our RiboTALs.

We inserted five different Anderson promoters (J23100, J23101, J23105, J23106 and J23109) upstream of TALe binding site 2 corresponding to TAL repressor 8 and a reporter, GFP. These constructs were then cotransformed with our construct containing TAL repressor 8 under the control of theophylline riboswitch 8.1* and pBAD [1].

Similarly to our initial testing constructs, we tested our Anderson promoter and RiboTAL constructs by subjecting the pBAD promoter and the theophylline riboswitch to a range of induction levels with arabinose and theophylline, respectively. It was expected that at low levels of arabinose and theophylline, GFP expression would be maximal due to the very low production of TAL repressor protein. On the other hand, at high levels of arabinose and theophylline it was expected that fluorescence levels would be greatly reduced due the higher rate of TAL repressor production. We also expected to see many instances of neither total GFP expression or total GFP repression, depending on the relative states of induction of the pBAD promoter and the theophylline riboswitch.

Unlike our initial testing constructs, we expected to see GFP expression vary with promoter strength. A promoter with a larger relative strength should overall show greater fluorescence levels than one with a smaller relative strength. We used the table of Variant RFP (au) values from the Anderson promoter pages as our measure for the relative strengthes of the promoters we used.

References

[1] S. A. Lynch and J. P. Gallivan, "A flow cytometry-based screen for synthetic riboswitches," Nucleic Acids Research, vol. 37, pp. 184-192, Jan 2009.