E coli is one the the fastest growers. They multiply every 20 min under optimal condition. How can we genetically engineer a bacteria that can grow as fast as possible? If so, do you think there is the limit of growth rate (eg., ~5 min/generation or lower )? In many practices, we want bacteria that can grow as fast as possible and produce desired products.
It depends on the bacteria that you have... You can try using elicitors in order to increase the growth rate of your bacteria.
You can see elicitors for... Pseudomonas aeruginosa....
Cheers,
My crazy thought is to make a super bug from an existing bacteria. First, remove all non-essential genes from a bacterial genome to minimize genome size an thus reduce the replication cost. Ensure that the new chromosome architecture does not affect gene expression. Optimize codon usage in the mini-genome. Once get the super bug, grow it under the optima condition to get super fast growth.
Daniel, looking at close strains of the same species I would say that up to 15-20% of genes can be removed without loss of species identity. Intergenic regions could be more important. Fastest growing bacteria will be really fast only in ideal conditions (stable temperature, full supply by energy, O2, N, non-organic ions, removal of toxic metabolits)
But, genome engineering will cause rapid natural changes in your bacteria that you cannot predict now. There are some ideas in http://www.microbialinformaticsj.com/content/1/1/11 and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-a-shapiro/what-natural-genetic-engi_b_2783419.html
Hi Daniel,
interesting idea! The actual question might be whats the limiting parameter for E. coli to grow so "slow". One might consider the size/diffusion rate, synthesis of proteins, lipids and polysaccharides.
I think you could go the way to create your "organism" (artificial live). In this case you choose your conditions (media composition, temperature, ect.) and include only the genes/pathways you want to have. The most complex part would be probably the gene regulation.
Good luck!
I must add that smaller genome does not equal to faster growth. Most of bacteria with small genome are slow growing.
Besides the smaller size and large surface area of bacteria, do you think the existence of ploycistronic regions (operons) might be one reason why bacteria can multiply faster than eukaryotes? Because multiple genes are transcribed together, it reduces the cost of transcription and may enhance the efficiency of translation. If so, can we combine compatible genes together and make some new operons under control of strong promoters?
I think that right now we may have a number of hypothesis but very poor understanding of the real mechansism of growth rate. Known factors: 1) gene expression rate - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2818994/; 2) chromosome replication rate - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22189092. Operone structure and their promoters are sure very important (see gene expression rate).
first of all I would try to select faster/slower multiplying isolates in several generations and sequence their genome.
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