Engineering AraC to make it responsive to light instead of arabinose
Romano, Edoardo Baumschlager, Armin Akmeriç, Emir Bora Palanisamy, Navaneethan Houmani, Moustafa Schmidt, Gregor Öztürk, Mehmet Ali Ernst, Leonard Khammash, Mustafa Di Ventura, Barbara
Romano, Edoardo
Baumschlager, Armin
Akmeriç, Emir Bora
Palanisamy, Navaneethan
Houmani, Moustafa
Schmidt, Gregor
Öztürk, Mehmet Ali
Ernst, Leonard
Khammash, Mustafa
Di Ventura, Barbara
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2021-04-26
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Abstract
The l-arabinose-responsive AraC and its cognate PBAD promoter underlie one of the most often used chemically inducible prokaryotic gene expression systems in microbiology and synthetic biology. Here, we change the sensing capability of AraC from l-arabinose to blue light, making its dimerization and the resulting PBAD activation light-inducible. We engineer an entire family of blue light-inducible AraC dimers in Escherichia coli (BLADE) to control gene expression in space and time. We show that BLADE can be used with pre-existing l-arabinose-responsive plasmids and strains, enabling optogenetic experiments without the need to clone. Furthermore, we apply BLADE to control, with light, the catabolism of l-arabinose, thus externally steering bacterial growth with a simple transformation step. Our work establishes BLADE as a highly practical and effective optogenetic tool with plug-and-play functionality—features that we hope will accelerate the broader adoption of optogenetics and the realization of its vast potential in microbiology, synthetic biology and biotechnology.
Citation
Romano, E., Baumschlager, A., Akmeric, E. B., Palanisamy, N., Houmani, M., Schmidt, G., Öztürk, M. A., Ernst, L., Khammash, M., & Di Ventura, B. (2021). Engineering AraC to make it responsive to light instead of arabinose. Nature chemical biology, 17(7), 817-827.
Publisher
Springer Nature
Journal
Nature Chemical Biology
Research Unit
DOI
10.1038/s41589-021-00787-6
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Article
Language
en
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This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review (when applicable) and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41589-021-00787-6.
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ISSN
1552-4450
EISSN
1552-4469
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