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Plasmids

Plasmids

Plasmids are extrachromosomal DNA molecules found in bacteria, archaea, and some eukaryotic microbes like yeast. These small, circular DNA structures typically contain fewer than 30 genes, although some may exist linearly. Plasmids vary in their number within a cell, known as copy number. Single-copy plasmids are present in one copy per cell and multi-copy plasmids are present in multiple copies, reaching over 100 copies per cell.Plasmids usually replicate independently of the chromosomal DNA...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 29, 2026

Standardized Modular Assembly of Polycistronic Operons with Modular Cloning (MoClo) using the In-Cloning toolkit

Standardized Modular Assembly of Polycistronic Operons with Modular Cloning (MoClo) using the In-Cloning toolkit

Published on: September 2, 2025

GeneGuard: A modular plasmid system designed for biosafety.

Oliver Wright^1,2, Mihails Delmans^1,2, Guy-Bart Stan^1,2

¹†Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.

ACS Synthetic Biology

|May 23, 2014

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Synthetic biology requires secure microbial systems for environmental applications. The GeneGuard platform ensures engineered microbes remain contained by making plasmids host-dependent and disadvantageous for other strains, enhancing biosafety.

Keywords:

biosafety biosensors environment horizontal gene transfer plasmids synthetic biology

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Last Updated: Apr 29, 2026

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Published on: September 2, 2025

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Rapid Assembly of Multi-Gene Constructs using Modular Golden Gate Cloning

Rapid Assembly of Multi-Gene Constructs using Modular Golden Gate Cloning

Published on: February 5, 2021

Area of Science:

Synthetic biology
Microbial biotechnology
Genetic engineering

Background:

Environmental deployment of engineered microbes raises safety concerns regarding uncontrolled proliferation and gene spread.
Antibiotic-resistant plasmids, commonly used for gene transfer, are inherently insecure and prone to horizontal gene transfer.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop a secure host-plasmid platform for synthetic biology applications.
To engineer plasmids that are dependent on a specific host strain and disadvantageous for others, preventing unintended spread.

Main Methods:

Conditional origins of replication and auxotrophies were used to create host-plasmid dependency.
Toxin-antitoxin pairs were implemented to confer disadvantage to non-target strains.
The GeneGuard system was tested for stability, host compatibility, and plasmid propagation control in E. coli and B. subtilis.

Main Results:

The GeneGuard system demonstrated stable host-plasmid co-existence for over 100 generations without antibiotic selection.
The engineered plasmids showed significantly reduced unintentional propagation in non-target strains.
The system did not disrupt the growth dynamics of the intended host E. coli.

Conclusions:

The GeneGuard platform provides a robust solution for enhancing the security of engineered microbes for environmental applications.
This system effectively mitigates risks associated with synthetic gene spread, enabling safer deployment in biosensing and other fields.