Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 30, 2025

Recombineering Homologous Recombination Constructs in Drosophila
Published on: July 13, 2013
Recombineering for Genetic Engineering of Natural Product Biosynthetic Pathways
Muhammad Nazeer Abbasi1, Jun Fu1, Xiaoying Bian1
1Helmholtz International Lab for Anti-Infectives, Shandong University-Helmholtz Institute of Biotechnology, State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Shandong University, Qingdao 266237, PR China.
Abstract:
Microbial genomes encode many cryptic and uncharacterized biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Exploiting this unexplored genetic wealth to discover microbial novel natural products (NPs) remains a challenging issue. We review homologous recombination (HR)-based recombineering, mediated by the recombinases RecE/RecT from Rac prophage and Redα/Redβ from lambda phage, which has developed into a highly inclusive tool for direct cloning of large DNA up to 100 kb, seamless mutation, multifragment assembly, and heterologous expression of microbial NP BGCs. Its utilization in the refactoring, engineering, and functional expression of long BGCs for NP biosynthesis makes it easy to elucidate NP-producing potential in microbes. This review also highlights various applications of recombineering in NP-derived drug discovery.
Related Concept Videos
Recombinant DNA
Conservative Site-specific Recombination and Phase Variation
The recognition sites for Cre recombinase called LoxP...
Synthetic Biology
Golden rice
Golden rice is a genetically modified...
Homologous Recombination
The Central Dogma
RNA is the Missing Link Between DNA and Proteins
In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that DNA stores all the information needed for cellular functions and that proteins perform most of these functions. However, the mechanisms of converting genetic information into functional proteins remained unknown for many years. Initially, it was believed that a single gene is...
Exon Recombination
Exon shuffling follows “splice frame rules.” Each exon...

