Building a Synthetic Biology Platform for Functional Screening of Promoter Sequences in Plants

• Grant number: 12/21064-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2013
• End date: December 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Biochemistry - Molecular Biology
• Principal Investigator: Marie-Anne Van Sluys
• Grantee: Edgar Andrés Ochoa Cruz
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IB). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 08/52074-0 - Sugarcane genome sequence: plant transposable elements are active contributors to gene structure variation, regulation and function, AP.BIOEN.TEM

Abstract

Synthetic biology engineers several genes to construct DNA circuits that can be programmed to control cellular behavior. There is a gap in the field that needs to be fulfilled by creation of standard biological parts, which can be used as building blocks and reliably mounted. Understand the structure and minimum information or combination of genes needed to create a specific function is also important to this technology development. This new area requires tools to allow high-throughput creation, characterization and incorporation of these new biological parts, as well as, make available these data trough public databases.The problem addressed in this project is the need of tools to characterize the promoter regions of plants (biological parts) and their specific expression patterns in tissues (context of interaction) in a fast experimental way.As a proof of concept, the project will generate a library of promoter sequences from tobacco using a strategy of shotgun-base promoter cloning, previously established for sugarcane at GaTELab (São Paulo University). The library will have a virtual and a physical component. Besides expanding the random use of cloning promoters in tobacco, the main objective of this work is to create the platform for screening promoter regions in planta using constitutive expression of red fluorescent protein as an indicator of tissue-specific activity of the promoters in tobacco. The tobacco library and a library of sugarcane, previously created by this same strategy, will be use to test the screening platform.

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

OCHOA CRUZ, EDGAR ANDRES; QUEIROGA CRUZ, GUILHERME MARCELLO; VIEIRA, ANDREIA PRATA; VAN SLUYS, MARIE-ANNE. Virus-like attachment sites as structural landmarks of plants retrotransposons. MOBILE DNA, v. 7, JUL 28 2016. (12/21064-4, 12/02671-7, 08/52074-0)