User:Jonathan Cline/Notebook/Ideal Microbe

Please edit this page to add ideas / thoughts / corrections

• Working in a garage-lab environment imposes some restrictions on choice of organisms to engineer.
• There are many choices of host organisms for engineering, each having different strengths and weaknesses.
• Host organisms can be genetically improved for fitness, if a concise set of requirements are made, for engineering the organism.
  • A great example is the ["eau d'e coli" project from iGEM] which removed (and enhanced!) the non-desirable smelly feature of the common BioBrick host.

Requirements for The Ideal Microbe

"Must" means that the requirement must be met for proper operation. "Should" means that the requirement should attempt to be met, however operation is not jeopardized by failure to meet the requirement. "Hopefully" means that the requirement isn't necessary for operation, however is nice to have.

Feature	Details	Requirement
Non-pathogenic	Cloning and growth is not harmful to people.	MUST
Transformable	Accepts vectors easily, makes engineering more precise.	MUST
Shelf life at least 1 year at 4C	Allows easy archival and low cost lab setup	MUST
Low mutation rate	Lower mutation rate makes engineering more precise.	Should
Room Temperature reproduction	Allows low cost lab setup	Should
Electroporation	Allows modification using alternative method	hopefully
Cells can be freeze-dried	Allows simple shipment method and low cost lab setup	hopefully
Public perceives host as "Friendly"	Hearing the name makes people smile rather than frown.	Should
Doesn't smell bad	Indole production is limited or absent.	hopefully
Looks translucent or opaque (or green?)	Doesn't invoke "yuck" when seen.	hopefully

Suggested Microbes so far

• Acinetobacter sp. ADP1
• Lactobacillus acidophilus
• Lactobacillus casei

References

[Full Text] Acinetobacter sp. ADP1: an ideal model organism for genetic analysis and genome engineering. Nucleic Acids Research 2004 32(19):5780-5790; doi:10.1093/nar/gkh881