{"title":"Building a pipeline to identify and engineer constitutive and repressible promoters.","authors":"Eric J Y Yang, Jennifer L Nemhauser","doi":"10.1017/qpb.2023.10","DOIUrl":"10.1017/qpb.2023.10","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>To support the increasingly complex circuits needed for plant synthetic biology applications, additional constitutive promoters are essential. Reusing promoter parts can lead to difficulty in cloning, increased heterogeneity between transformants, transgene silencing and trait instability. We have developed a pipeline to identify genes that have stable expression across a wide range of <i>Arabidopsis</i> tissues at different developmental stages and have identified a number of promoters that are well expressed in both transient (<i>Nicotiana benthamiana</i>) and stable (<i>Arabidopsis</i>) transformation assays. We have also introduced two genome-orthogonal gRNA target sites in a subset of the screened promoters, converting them into NOR logic gates. The work here establishes a pipeline to screen for additional constitutive promoters and can form the basis of constructing more complex information processing circuits in the future.</p>","PeriodicalId":101358,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative plant biology","volume":"4 ","pages":"e12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10600573/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71416520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The art of painting chromosome loops.","authors":"Alexandre Berr, Marie-Edith Chabouté","doi":"10.1017/qpb.2023.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qpb.2023.11","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How to get a metre of DNA into a tiny space while preserving its functional characteristics? This question seems easy to pose, but the answer is far from being trivial. Facing this riddle, salvation came from technical improvements in microscopy and <i>in situ</i> hybridisation techniques applied to cytogenetics. Here, we would like to look into the past at one of these pure cytogenetics articles that makes a breakthrough in addressing this question in plant science. Our choice fell on the work published two decades ago by Fransz et al. (2002). Besides the elegant manner in which DNA probes were organised to bring into light the out-looping arrangement of interphase chromosomes in <i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i> nuclei, this article perfectly illustrates that painting is not reserved to the fine art. As for whether emotional expression prioritised by artists can sometimes hide behind scientific empirical evidence, there is only a small step to make to the general case.</p>","PeriodicalId":101358,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative plant biology","volume":"4 ","pages":"e11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10600566/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71416522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}