Development of Strong Anaerobic Fluorescent Reporters for Clostridium acetobutylicum and Clostridium ljungdahlii Using HaloTag and SNAP-tag Proteins

Abstract

Up to this point, assays and methods involving fluorescent reporter proteins were unavailable or limited in Clostridium organisms and other strict anaerobes. Green fluorescent protein (GFP), mCherry, and flavin-binding proteins (and their derivatives) have been used only in a few clostridia with limited success and yielded low fluorescence compared to aerobic microbial systems. Recently, we reported a new strong fluorescent reporter system based on the FAST protein as a first step in expanding the fluorescence-based reporters for Clostridium and other anaerobic microbial platforms. Additional strong orthogonal fluorescent proteins, with distinct emission spectra are needed to allow for (i) multispecies tracking within the growing field of microbial cocultures and microbiomes, (ii) protein localization and tracking in anaerobes, and (iii) identification and development of natural and synthetic promoters, ribosome-binding sites (RBS), and terminators for optimal protein expression in anaerobes. Here, we present two new strong fluorescent reporter systems based on the HaloTag and SNAP-tag proteins.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2020
Source ID
10.1128/aem.01271-20

Entities

People

  • Eleftherios T Papoutsakis
  • Hannah Streett
  • Kamil Charubin

Organizations

  • Army Research Office
  • United States Department of Energy
  • University of Delaware

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Biology

Readers

  • Microbial Pathology
  • Molecular Genetics

Technology Areas

  • Biotechnology