High-Throughput Mutant Screening via Transposon Sequencing

Transposon mutagenesis has been the method of choice for genetic screens and selections in bacteria by virtue of the transposon being linked to the disrupted gene, simplifying its identification. Transposon sequencing (Tn-seq) is a high-throughput version of transposon mutant screening, in which massively parallel sequencing is used to simultaneously follow the fitness of all mutants in a complex library. In a single experiment, one can use Tn-seq to interrogate the contribution of all genes of a bacterium to fitness under a condition of interest. Here, we introduce a method to construct a saturating transposon insertion library in Gram-negative bacteria, to capture the transposon junctions en masse, and to identify essential genes and conditional genes using massively parallel sequencing. The accompanying protocol was developed as part of Cold Spring Harbor's Advanced Bacterial Genetics course.