Katrin Geisler

@alisonsmith25.bsky.social
@camplantsci.bsky.social
@theplantjournal.bsky.social

#AlgalBiotech, #Diatoms, #AlgalInnovationCentre, #PlantSciences, #Microalgae, #ThePlantJournal

A new tool for engineering Phaeodactylum tricornutum: the METE promoter drives both high expression and B12‐tuneable regulation of transgenes The promoter of the METE gene in the diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum is repressed by nanomolar concentrations of vitamin B12. It can be used to tune the expression of genes for reporter proteins or ...

If you want to read about a strong tuneable promoter in a diatom, see our publication: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It was a team effort! So thank you, Patrick Hickland, Alison Smith, and the rest of the Plant Met lab at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge.

Professor Jake Harris, Professor Alison Smith and Dr Paweł Mordaka from Cambridge University's Department of Plant Sciences. Photo credits: University of Cambridge.

Researchers from Cambridge's Dept. Plant Sciences are among 9 teams to be awarded ARIA Synthetic Plants funding today - paving the way for more productive, resilient, and sustainable plants.🌱

tinyurl.com/ys3w6v2x

@c-jake-harris.bsky.social‬
@alisonsmith25.bsky.social
@cambridgebiosci.bsky.social

Some great Marchantia work from the lab next door.

The minimal cell-cycle control system in Marchantia as a framework for understanding plant cell proliferation The regulation of cell division is broadly conserved across eukaryotes, governed by cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) to coordinate progression through the cell cycle. Plants have evolved a ...

After a lot of work, we are finally able to share this project about the cell cycle in Marchantia from the Haseloff lab. If you want to find out how cell division is controlled, you can’t miss out this one… #PlantScience #Synbio #EvoDevo

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Chlamydomonas chloroplast genes tolerate compression of the genetic code to just 51 codons Genome scale engineering has enabled codon compression of the universal genetic code of up to three codons in E. coli, providing the means for genetic code expansion. To go much beyond this number, smaller and simpler genetic systems are needed to avoid significant technical challenges. Chloroplast genomes offer multiple advantages for codon compression and reassignment. Here we report a recoding scheme for the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii chloroplast genome, in which two stop codons and one or more of the codons for arginine, glycine, isoleucine, leucine and serine, all of which have two cognate tRNAs, are absent, compressing the genetic code to 51 codons. Firstly, several recoding strategies were tested on the essential rpoA gene, encoding a subunit of the chloroplast RNA polymerase. A defined compression scheme, which relied on swapping the target codons with the permitted frequent codons, could replace the native protein coding sequence without affecting chloroplast protein expression levels or the strain fitness. The same strategy was successfully used for codon compression of ycf1, encoding a subunit of the chloroplast translocon, psaA and psbA, intron-containing highly-expressed genes encoding reaction centres subunits of both photosystems, and an 8.5 kb operon encoding essential and non-essential genes. Finally, we tested degeneracy of the 51-codon genetic code by exploring the combinatorial design for the large subunit of RuBisCO, relying on restoration of photosynthesis in an rbcL mutant strain. More than 70 functional sequences with diverse codon adaptation indices were recovered. In all codon-compressed genes there was no observable penalty on photosynthetic growth. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

New paper this week from the Plant Metabolism group:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@alisonsmith25.bsky.social
@kittyclouston.bsky.social
@andreholzer.bsky.social

We are freezing but Phaeodactylum is growing.

Phaeodactylum tricornutum grown with no temperature control in the AIC, using the Varicon Aqua Phyco-Pond system.

The first image was taken a few days before Tatiana and I set up an algae culture in the @Algal Innovation Centre (AIC) -
www.linkedin.com/posts/algal-...

Regulation of nucleus‐encoded trans‐acting factors allows orthogonal fine‐tuning of multiple transgenes in the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii A strain of Chlamydomonas has been generated that allows independent regulation of two genes in the chloroplast by addition of vitamins B12 and thiamine to the culture medium.

Excited to share the latest work from our lab! Great work from Pawel Mordaka, @kittyclouston.bsky.social and the rest of the PlantMet team at @camplantsci.bsky.social.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....