Development of multiplexing gene silencing system using conditionally induced polycistronic synthetic antisense RNAs in Escherichia coli

Abstract

Although efficient methods of gene silencing have been established in eukaryotes, many different techniques are still used in bacteria due to the lack of a standardized tool. Here, we developed a convenient and efficient method to downregulate the expression of a specific gene using ∼140 nucleotide RNA with a 24-nucleotide antisense region from an arabinose-inducible expression plasmid by taking Escherichia coli lacZ and phoA genes encoding β-galactosidase and alkaline phosphatase, respectively, as target genes to evaluate the model. We examined the antisense RNA (asRNA) design, including targeting position, uORF stability elements at the 5′-end, and Hfq-binding module at the 3′-end, and inducer amount required to obtain effective experimental conditions for gene silencing. Furthermore, we constructed multiplexed dual-acting asRNA genes in the plasmid, which were transcribed as polycistronic RNA and were able to knockdown multiple target genes simultaneously. We observed the highest inhibition level of 98.6% when lacZ was targeted using the pMKN104 asRNA expression plasmid, containing a five times stronger PBAD -10 promoter sequence with no requirement of the Hfq protein for repression. These features allow the system to be utilized as an asRNA expression platform in many bacteria, besides E. coli, for gene regulation.