Team:UANL Mty-Mexico/Contributions/UANLBricks

In our Project, one of the main contributions has been the generation of a new genetic circuit construction standard called "UANL Bricks Assembly". This standard has arisen from the need of an alternative way for device construction from pieces containing some of the restrictions sites of the classic biobrick standard, besides having the ability to have more options when performing cuts and ligations of the genetic elements. The structure and origin of our new standard is explained next.

At the time of carrying out the device construction to integrate, the main idea was use the classic biobrick standard. However, it was observed that some of the genetic elements used for this construction had the PstI, EcoRI y SpeI sites, avoiding it from being used.

For these reasons, we opted for the generation of a new standard that will meet our needs. That was why we generated the UANL Bricks, having the following structure:

The main reasons why we chose these sites is explained next:

The use of this second pair of sites allow us to have versatility at the moment of the elements union for the generation of devices or circuits in a Biobrick way, increasing the variability of options for constructions.

Therefore, If the parts do not have XbaI or SpeI inside of them, construction could be performed using ApaI and SalI as EcoRi and PstI, respectively. However, if the parts do have Xba or SpeI sites, the constructions could be performed as show in the following scheme.

The next subject to evaluate of our new standard was the viability, reason why we did a search of the economics, practical and useful aspects of the chosen enzymes.

First, we did a search for the prices, concentrations and compatibility of the used enzymes, obtaining the first two aspects was equivalent in both standards (classic and UANL bricks), besides they all work at 100% in buffer 4 of New England Biolabs.

Also, we evaluated the capacity of these enzymes to cleavage close to the end of linear DNA fragments, which would be useful when directly cut PCR products.

Finally, we search the distributions of UANL Brick's sites in vectors used in molecular biology, in order to know which ones could be used for cloning. In this study we include vectors from companies like Fermentas ®, Promega ®, Invitrogen ®, New England Biolabs ®, besides the classic biobrick vector pSB1A2.