Iterative marker excision system

The deletions of large genomic DNA fragments and consecutive gene knockouts are prerequisites for the generation of organisms with improved properties. One of the key issues in this context is the removal of antibiotic resistance markers from engineered organisms without leaving an active recombinase recognition site. Here, we report the establishment of an iterative marker excision system (IMES) that solves this problem. Based on the phiC31 integrase and its mutant att sites, IMES can be used for highly effective deletion of DNA fragments between inversely oriented B-CC and P-GG sites. The B-CC and P-GG sites are derived from attB and attP by substitution of the central core TT dinucleotide with CC and GG, respectively. An unnatural RR site that resides in the chromosome following deletion is the joining product of the right shoulders of B-CC and P-GG. We show that the RR sites do not recombine with each other as well as the RR site recombines with B-CC. The recombination efficiencies between RR and P-GG or RR and LL are only 0.1 % and 1 %, respectively. Thus, IMES can be used for multistep genomic engineering without risking unwanted DNA recombination. The fabrication of multi-purpose antibiotic cassettes and examples of the utilisation of IMES are described.