DNA Assembly

DNA in living cells is very long, but current technologies can only make relatively short stretches of DNA and this imposes limitations. Short lengths of DNA can be chemically synthesised directly, but longer lengths have to be made joining these shorter lengths together in an assembly process.

We have been developing technology for DNA assembly for some years. You can review some of the background papers listed below. We have now developed this technology further to simplify and strengthen it and we term this new technology UniClo. Unicol is a universally applicable DNA assembly method that can be used to assemble any DNA sequence regardless of the presence of type IIS restriction enzyme sites in the sequence to be assembled. It only requires three basic vectors for any hierarchical assembly and does not leave any scars of unwanted sequence between the DNA fragments to be assembled. The technology makes use of site-specific recombinant methylases to regulate the activity of type IIS restriction enzymes.

We have recently been awarded a multi-million pound grant to develop this technology further and to apply it to the development of synthetic organelle genomes. We will create a fully synthetic chloropast geneome that uses only naturally occurring sequences to pool sequences with genetic variants that are predicted to convey beneficial properties to crop plants (potato and wheat). The poject is a collaborative project which aims not only to develop the technology, but to apply it to a real-world problem that can be translated rapidly into routine societal use.

Our key collaborators are Professor Steve Kelly and Professor Francesco Licausi of the Department of Biology in Oxford.

We are currently recruiting posts to contribute to this work, so please get in touch if you are interested in getting involved.

Overview of Assembly

Engineering methylation