The team led by Tomáš Pluskal at IOCB Prague together with colleagues from Charles University developed a molecular cloning toolkit for generating genetic circuits for the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Adapted from the popular MoClo-YTK plasmid kit for Saccharomyces cerevisiae and using the same modular cloning grammar, the new POMBOX toolkit is designed to facilitate fast, efficient, and modular construction of genetic circuits consisting of multiple transcriptional units.
The scientists demonstrated the utility of the POMBOX kit for synthetic biology applications by engineering S. pombe to produce specialized metabolite precursors, namely, methylxanthine, amorpha-4,11-diene, and cinnamic acid from the purine, mevalonate, and aromatic amino acid pathways.
Read the paper: Hebra, T.; Smrčková, H.; Elkatmis. B.; Převorovský, M.; Pluskal, T. POMBOX: A Fission Yeast Cloning Toolkit for Molecular and Synthetic Biology. ACS Synth Biol, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.3c00529
