Quorum-sensing based small RNA regulation for dynamic and tuneable gene expression.

Abstract

Developing a dynamic regulation strategy is an essential step in establishing an automatic control system for manipulating metabolic fluxes and cellular behaviors. To broaden the extent of the application, a system that can generally control any gene of interest is demanded. Through characterization and optimization, the strategy repressed the immediate expression incrementally from 0 to 90% during culturing. Moreover, by changing single base pair in the lux box of the Plux promoter, the degree of repression of the target genomic gene was tuned to a difference of 70%. This strategy is expected to control metabolic flux without disrupting cell growth. We engineered bacterial small RNA to develop a pathway-independent strategy that can dynamically repress the expression of any gene at the posttranscription level.