Outreach

An interview with Dr Rosie Young, an expert on the development of genetic tools for the expression of foreign proteins in the microalgal chloroplast

The challenges and how CUO has helped
CUO has helped Dr Young’s group to design transgenes that are theoretically optimised for expression in the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. She hopes this will increase the level of protein production so that microalgae can compete successfully with other expression platforms (eg. E. coli and mammalian cell culture) in the future. There is no direct evidence to show that optimisation using CUO is beneficial yet, but the results so far are encouraging.

Opinion on the current development of open source software
Dr Young stressed that freeware programs are very useful for molecular biologists. She uses programs on the web for tasks like:
• DNA sequence translation
• Reverse complementation
• Protein structure prediction
• Sequence comparison
The programs are either provided by bioinformatics institutes or by individual labs. She has mentioned that she does not have the need to adapt any programs for her own use but open source software would easily enable that if necessary.

Possible downsides of the open source characteristics of CUO
From a research lab point of view, she does not think there is a downside, as long as the program is rigorously tested and a paper is published about it as soon as possible. This will enable other groups to use the program as they wish. However, she did point out that the best thing to do would be to keep the program available to download via the lab's research pages only while validation is ongoing and allow members of the lab maintain and improve it. Once the lab has the scientific evidence that optimisation using CUO is beneficial, then the whole scientific community can benefit.

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Safety

• Synthetic gene technology has developed to such an extent that now it has become easier to use and implement. Now with software available to help in design, coupled with cheapening synthetic gene services, the technological barrier is becoming even lower for normal people to engineer genes. This can be good but also bad because it will be considerably easier to engineer nasty biological product or even bioweapons. Bioterrorism will be easy to do either purposely or accidentally by not properly trained individuals playing the genes as some kind of hobby.
• Proposed Solution: track the ordering customer's identity. Pattern check the ordered synthetic sequence and prevent unlicensed customers from ordering potentially dangerous genes.

• There is a misconception about codon optimization that changing the coding sequence of a wild type gene and transforming it may cause unintented products. The truth is actually the other way round. If a wild type gene is to be transformed into a foreign host, the wild type gene does already have the risk of producing unintended effect in the host. By doing rational optimization and sequence design, the unitended effects can be identified and eliminated instead.