Research for biotechnological applications of cyanobacteria focuses on synthetic pathways and bioreactor design, while little effort is devoted to introduce new, promising organisms in the field. Applications are most often based on recombinant work, and the establishment of transformation can be a risky, time-consuming procedure. In this work we demonstrate the natural transformation of the filamentous cyanobacterium Phormidium lacuna and insertion of a selection marker into the genome by homologous recombination. This is the first example for natural transformation filamentous non-heterocystous cyanobacterium. We found that Phormidium lacuna is polyploid, each cell has about 20-90 chromosomes. Transformed filaments were resistant against up to 14 mg/ml of kanamycin. Formerly, natural transformation in cyanobacteria has been considered a rare and exclusive feature of a few unicellular species. Our finding suggests that natural competence is more distributed among cyanobacteria than previously thought. This is supported by bioinformatic analyses which show that all protein factors for natural transformation are present in the majority of the analyzed cyanobacteria.
9Research for biotechnological applications of cyanobacteria focuses on synthetic pathways and 10 bioreactor design, while little effort is devoted to introduce new, promising organisms in the field. 11Applications are most often based on recombinant work, and the establishment of transformation 12 can be a risky, time-consuming procedure. In this work we demonstrate the natural transformation 13 of the filamentous cyanobacterium Phormidium lacuna and insertion of a selection marker into the 14 genome by homologous integration. This is the first example for natural transformation of a member 15 of the order Oscillatoriales. We found that Phormidium lacuna is polyploid, each cell has about 20-16 100 chromosomes. Transformed filaments were resistant against up to 15 mg/ml of kanamycin, and 17 the high resistance feature allowed for rapid segregation into all chromosomes. Formerly, natural 18 transformation in cyanobacteria has been considered a rare and exclusive feature of a few unicellular 19 species. Our finding suggests that natural competence is more distributed among cyanobacteria than 20 previously thought. This is supported by bioinformatic analyses which show that all protein factors 21 for natural transformation are present in the majority of the analyzed cyanobacteria. 22
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