Cis-acting regulatory elements: from random screening to quantitative design

Abstract

The cis-acting regulatory elements, e.g., promoters and ribosome binding sites (RBSs) with various desired properties, are building blocks widely used in synthetic biology for fine tuning gene expression. In the last decade, acquisition of a controllable regulatory element from a random library has been established and applied to control the protein expression and metabolic flux in different chassis cells. However, more rational strategies are still urgently needed to improve the efficiency and reduce the laborious screening and multifaceted characterizations. Building precise computational models that can predict the activity of regulatory elements and quantitatively design elements with desired strength have been demonstrated tremendous potentiality. Here, recent progress on construction of cis-acting regulatory element library and the quantitative predicting models for design of such elements are reviewed and discussed in detail.

Graphical abstract

References

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, grant No. 2012CB721104), the National High Technology Research and Development Program (863 Program, grant No. 2012AA02A701), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant Nos. 31170101 and 31301017), and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (grant No. 2015A030310317).

COMPLIANCE WITH ETHICS GUIDELINES

The authors Hailin Meng and Yong Wang declare they have no conflict of interests.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2015 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg