Clostridia are often representatives of acetogenic and solventogenic bacteria. They are able to produce a wide range of substrates, including ethanol or butanol. Therefore, they are possessing great biotechnological relevance. However, even though they are super producers, challenging genetic accessibility and limited knowledge of working methods affected our work extremely. One more difficulty is that they live anaerobic. For this reason, no normal wet lab work was possible as we always had to work under exclusion of oxygen. We designed a clostridia guide to make this bacterial genus more accessible for the future iGEM-teams to empower them to work with these biotechnological relevant bacteria. We provide detailed information about our reliable cultivation and transformation methods. Furthermore, we introduce all relevant equipment and give advice on how to work anaerobically and prevent future iGEM-teams from making common mistakes, we first did.
With this ultimate Clostridia guide, we open up a new bacterial group to the iGEM community.