Team:USTC/Project/shell/bkgrd

BACKGROUND

T hough the precise mechanism of assembly of the shell is not known, it is reported that the pdu operon encodes for seven proteins that display sequence similarity to the shell proteins of the BMC shell, including pduA, -B, -J, -K, -N, -T, and –U. Of these it is known that pduB is synthesized in two forms that differ in size by 37 amino acid residues due to two translation start site on the polycistronic message (Parsons et al.,2008). Recent research reveals that pduT and pduU are not essential for BMC formation, since constructs containing pduA-B-J-K-N is able to form delimited structures within the cell cytoplasm when transformed into E.coli. Meanwhile, pduA, pduJ, pduK and pduN are proved to play essential roles in the formation of the microcompartment (Parsons et al., 2010). On the basis of previous study on reconstruction of BMC in E.coli, we designed two road maps of assembling pdu genes, one is in RFC10 standard and the other is in RFC53 standard, a extensive standard we designed for scarless protein fusion.