A family of cloning vectors containing the lacUV5 promoter

Abstract

A family of plasmids containing short pieces of Escherichia coli lac promoter DNA has been constructed. DNA fragments from any source may be inserted directly into the unique EcoRI sites of some of these plasmids to achieve transcription under the control of the lacUV5 promoter. Alternatively, the plasmids serve as convenient sources of lac DNA fragments (‘portable promoters’) containing the ‘up’ promoter mutations UV5 or P s (super promoter) as well as the wild-type promoter. pOP95-2, pOP95-5, pOP203-1, pOP203-2 and pOP203-3 are derivatives of pMB9 while pOP95-15 and pOP203-13 are derivatives of pBR322. The pOP95 plasmids contain the 95-bp AluI lac fragment. This fragment includes the UV5 promoter (minus the CAP binding site), the repressor binding site, and ends 2 bp before an ATG encoding the β-Gal start codon. The pOP203 plasmids contain the 203-bp HaeIII lac fragment. This fragment contains the UV5 promoter (including the L8 mutation in the CAP binding site), the repressor binding site and sequences encoding the first 8 amino acids of β-Gal. To shorten and introduce reading frame heterogeneity in the β-Gal coding end of the pOP203 plasmids, the EcoRI site in pOP203-12 was moved upstream by digesting EcoRI cut plasmid DNA with T4 DNA polymerase and Sl nuclease followed by ligation in the presence of EcoRI linker. This produced the plasmids pOP203-24, pOP203-27, pOP203-28 and pOP203-29. pOP203-29 encodes essentially just that portion of the β-Gal mRNA sequence which is protected from nuclease digestion by the bound ribosomal complex (Maizels, 1974).