Environmental applications of transposable elements: Tn7 and sleeping beauty transposons

Abstract

Transposons are DNA elements that can move from one site to another site without sequence homology. The current paper provides a mini-review on Tn7 and Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposons and their applications. The repurposed transposon systems have a wide variety of applications in environmental biotechnology. These systems can accelerate and increase the accuracy of research in environmental biotechnology. Therefore, from the environmental engineering and biotechnology perspective, the current review focused on elaborating working principles and components of Tn7 and SB transposons.Bacterial transposon Tn7 exhibits two elaborate pathways for target integration. One pathway leads to single site integration in a chromosomal target. The second pathway promotes integration into multiple targets in conjugal plasmids. The Tn7 system can be repurposed for the integration of a gene of interest or large DNA cargo into bacterial genomes. The Tn7 system is active in a wide variety of Gram-negative bacteria. Therefore, the Tn7 system offers a great tool for genetic manipulation in bacteria and can be utilized in a variety of applications in the field of environmental engineering and environmental biotechnology. SB transposon is a silent fish transposon. It has been synthetically reactivated and is active in a wide variety of mammalian cells including humans. The SB transposon system is small and contains only a single transposition enzyme. The SB transposon system can be utilized for stable longterm expression of a gene of interest in mammalian cells. The SB system can be used for studying cellular responses to environmental pollutants.