The Marburg Collection: A Golden Gate DNA Assembly Framework for Synthetic Biology Applications in <i>Vibrio natriegens</i>

Abstract

<i>Vibrio natriegens</i> is known as the world's fastest growing organism with a doubling time of less than 10 min. This incredible growth speed empowers <i>V. natriegens</i> as a chassis for synthetic and molecular biology, potentially replacing <i>E. coli</i> in many applications. While first genetic parts have been built and tested for <i>V. natriegens</i>, a comprehensive toolkit containing well-characterized and standardized parts did not exist. To close this gap, we created the Marburg Collection-a highly flexible Golden Gate cloning toolbox optimized for the emerging chassis organism <i>V. natriegens</i>, containing 191 genetic parts. The Marburg Collection overcomes the paradigm of plasmid construction-integrating inserts into a backbone-by enabling the <i>de novo</i> assembly of plasmids from basic genetic parts. This allows users to select the plasmid replication origin and resistance part independently, which is highly advantageous when limited knowledge about the behavior of those parts in the target organism is available. Additional design highlights of the Marburg Collection are novel connector parts, which facilitate modular circuit assembly and, optionally, the inversion of individual transcription units to reduce transcriptional crosstalk in multigene constructs. To quantitatively characterize the genetic parts contained in the Marburg Collection in <i>V. natriegens</i>, we developed a reliable microplate reader measurement workflow for reporter experiments and overcame organism-specific challenges. We think the Marburg Collection with its thoroughly characterized parts will provide a valuable resource for the growing <i>V. natriegens</i> community.