Gateway Technology

Gateway Technology

The Gateway cloning System, invented and commercialized by Invitrogen since the late 1990s, is a molecular biology method that enables researchers to efficiently transfer DNA-fragments between plasmids using a proprietary set of recombination sequences, the "Gateway att" sites, and two proprietary enzyme mixes, called "LR Clonase", and "BP Clonase". Gateway Cloning Technique allows transfer of DNA fragments between different cloning vectors while maintaining the reading frame. Using Gateway, one can clone or subclone DNA segments for functional analysis. The system requires the initial insertion of a DNA fragment into a plasmid with two flanking recombination sequences called “att L 1” and “att L 2”, to develop a “Gateway Entry clone” (special Invitrogen nomenclature).

Large archives of Gateway Entry clones, containing the vast majority of human, mouse and rat ORFs (open reading frames) have been cloned from human cDNA libraries or chemically synthesized to support the research community using NIH (National Institutes of Health) funding (e.g., Mammalian Gene Collection, http://mgc.nci.nih.gov/). The availability of these gene cassettes in a standard Gateway cloning plasmid helps researchers quickly transfer these cassettes into plasmids that facilitate the analysis of gene function. Gateway cloning does take more time for initial set-up, and is more expensive than traditional restriction enzyme and ligase-based cloning methods, but it saves time, and offers simpler and highly efficient cloning for down-stream applications.

The technology has been widely adopted by the life science research community especially for applications that require the transfer of thousands of DNA fragments into one type of plasmid (e.g., one containing a CMV promoter for protein expression in mammalian cells), or for the transfer of one DNA fragment into many different types of plasmids (e.g., for bacterial, insect and mammalian protein expression).

Read more about Gateway Technology:  Basic Steps, See Also

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