In our design, there is a module on cross-species gene expression in which we want to design synthetic promoters that work in both prokaryotes as well as yeast.
Currently, the synthetic promoters available in the literature are limited and have a small dynamic range, limiting the testing of cross-species gene expression. To address this issue, we chose to cross the J23 family of constitutive promoters (J23119, J23100, J23104, J23113) as well as plac in prokaryotes with several artificially designed promoters (TE1, TE2, TE3, TE4, TE5) in yeast recently reported in the literature. The bacterial constitutive promoter is loaded upstream of the yeast promoter to form a hybrid promoter.
We tested these combinations in brewer's yeast as well as bacteria, using the TEF1 promoter, which is capable of expression in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic forms, as a control. The results showed that both in yeast and in bacteria, these promoters stably drove gene expression and showed a decreasing trend consistent with data reported in the literature. This set of results suggests that our engineering of this module was successful.
