A totally synthetic plasmid for general cloning, gene expression and mutagenesis in Escherichia coli

A first totally synthetic Escherichia coli plasmid has been designed, constructed and shown to be a functional, stable, high-copy cloning vector. The FokI method of gene synthesis [Mandecki and Bolling, Gene 68 (1988) 101-107] was used to assemble the plasmid from 30 oligodeoxyribonucleotides. The plasmid contains synthetic modules for the beta-lactamase-encoding gene (bla), replication origin, lacZ gene fragment and multicloning site. The plasmid is patterned after the pUC-type plasmids and has a copy number similar to that of pUC plasmids. The major changes introduced include the removal of nearly 50% of the restriction sites present in pUC plasmids, reduction of plasmid size to 2050 bp, and introduction of transcription terminators downstream from both the bla gene and lacZ fragment. The changes facilitate a number of techniques, such as cloning, mutagenesis, expression and restriction analysis.