Artificial Gene Synthesis - Gene Optimization

Gene Optimization

While the ability to make increasingly long stretches of DNA efficiently and at lower prices is a technological driver of this field, increasingly attention is being focused on improving the design of genes for specific purposes. Early in the genome sequencing era, gene synthesis was used as an (expensive) source of cDNA's that were predicted by genomic or partial cDNA information but were difficult to clone. As higher quality sources of sequence verified cloned cDNA have become available, this practice has become less urgent.

Producing large amounts of protein from gene sequences (or at least the protein coding regions of genes, the open reading frame) found in nature can sometimes prove difficult and is a problem of sufficient impact that scientific conferences have been devoted to the topic. Many of the most interesting proteins sought by molecular biologist are normally regulated to be expressed in very low amounts in wild type cells. Redesigning these genes offers a means to improve gene expression in many cases. Rewriting the open reading frame is possible because of the degeneracy of the genetic code. Thus it is possible to change up to about a third of the nucleotides in an open reading frame and still produce the same protein. The available number of alternate designs possible for a given protein is astronomical. For a typical protein sequence of 300 amino acids there are over 10150 codon combinations that will encode an identical protein. Using optimization methods such as replacing rarely used codons with more common codons sometimes have a dramatic effects. Further optimizations such as removing RNA secondary structures can also be included. At least in the case of E. coli, protein expression is maximized by predominantly using codons corresponding to tRNA's that retain amino acid charging during starvation. Computer programs are written to perform these, and other simultaneous optimizations are used to handle the enormous complexity of the task. A well optimized gene can improve protein expression 2 to 10 fold, and in some cases more than 100 fold improvements have been reported. Because of the large numbers of nucleotide changes made to the original DNA sequence, the only practical way to create the newly designed genes is to use gene synthesis.