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Measuring E. coli and bacteriophage DNA in cell sonicates to evaluate the CAL1 reaction as a synthetic biology standard for qPCR

Templar, A; Schofield, DM; Nesbeth, DN; (2017) Measuring E. coli and bacteriophage DNA in cell sonicates to evaluate the CAL1 reaction as a synthetic biology standard for qPCR. Biomolecular Detection and Quantification , 11 pp. 21-30. 10.1016/j.bdq.2016.12.001. Green open access

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Abstract

We measured the impact of the presence of total Escherichia coli (E. coli) cellular material on the performance of the Linear Regression of Efficiency (LRE) method of absolute quantitative PCR (LRE qPCR), which features the putatively universal CAL1 calibration reaction, which we propose as a synthetic biology standard. We firstly used a qPCR reaction in which a sequence present in the lone genomic BirA locus is amplified. Amplification efficiency for this reaction, a key metric for many quantitative qPCR methods, was inhibited by cellular material from bioreactor cultivation to a greater extent than material from shake flask cultivation. We then compared LRE qPCR to the Standard Curve method of absolute qPCR (SC qPCR). LRE qPCR method matched the performance of the SC qPCR when used to measure 417–4.17 × 107 copies of the BirA target sequence present in a shake flask-derived cell sonicates sample, and for 97–9.7 × 105 copies in the equivalent bioreactor-derived sample. A plasmid-encoded T7 bacteriophage sequence was next used to compare the methods. In the presence of cell sonicates from samples of up to OD600 = 160, LRE qPCR outperformed SC qPCR in the range of 1.54 × 108–1.54 × 1010 copies of the T7 target sequence and matched SC qPCR over 1.54 × 104–1.54 × 107 copies. These data suggest the CAL1 standard, combined with the LRE qPCR method, represents an attractive choice as a synthetic biology qPCR standard that performs well even when unpurified industrial samples are used as the source of template material.

Type: Article
Title: Measuring E. coli and bacteriophage DNA in cell sonicates to evaluate the CAL1 reaction as a synthetic biology standard for qPCR
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.bdq.2016.12.001
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bdq.2016.12.001
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier GmbH. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Pcr; Synthetic biology; Standard curve; Standardisation; Linear regression; Efficiency
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Biochemical Engineering
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1531625
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