AgResearch has received a request to send DNA from Methanobacterium sp. BRM9 to Nick Robinson, a senior lecturer at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/health-and-medicine/about-us/people/nicholas-robinson
Nick is working on genes involved in archaeal viral defence pathways. His lab will amplify genes involved in this process and clone them into expression vectors, from which they will then try protein expression and structural/biochemical analyses. His interests are in archaeal DNA repair and replication systems and their associated proteins, as a way of understanding the origins of similar systems in eukaryotes.
Methanobacterium sp. BRM9 is from the AgResearch Rumen Microbiology collection, and is part of the BIP associated with the PGgRc-funded methane mitigation research programmes at AgResearch. The genome of BRM9 has been published (Kelly et al., 2014), and so Nick or others could generate these proteins by synthesising the genes and ligating them into plasmids (“cloning”) for expression. However, as his appears to be a small budget lab, they seem to prefer the cheaper option of amplifying them by PCR and ligating the PCR products.
The genome has been published and the gene could be synthesised anyway. Publication of the genome comes with an implicit understanding that resources are shared with interested parties if possible. Therefore, I recommend that we send a small amount of BRM9 DNA to Nick. We have a DNA sample that we could ship. We will not be sending live cultures.
I hope the information supplied is sufficient for a quick decision. Although Nick’s research doesn’t seem to overlap with ours at all, who knows if we might want to collaborate with him in future. In any case, good scientific citizenship is always a good thing, and you never know where we will need to interact again in the future.
Research overview for Nick Robinson
The Robinson laboratory studies fundamental cellular processes that are responsible for the maintenance of chromosomal integrity and protein homeostasis. The dysregulation and mutation of these crucial pathways can result in a variety of pathological conditions including cancer, neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases. The laboratory utilizes the experimental tractability of thermophilic archaeal species to investigate these essential processes. Although archaeal species are ancient microbes, components of the archaeal DNA repair and replication systems and protein degradation pathways display functional homology to their eukaryotic counterparts. Therefore, eukaryotic-like processes can be studied in these experimentally amenable organisms. Furthermore, the robust and stable archaeal protein homologues isolated from thermophilic species offer unparalleled benefits for the structural and biochemical study of these essential cellular pathways. By taking advantage of these streamlined archaeal systems, while employing a range of biochemical and structural approaches, the main aims of the laboratory are to further our understanding of the evolution and mechanistic action of the DNA replication-associated DNA repair events and also ubiquitin-like modifications and proteasomal degradation pathways.
Reference
Kelly WJ, Leahy SC, Li D, Perry R, Lambie SC, Attwood GT, Altermann E (2014) The complete genome sequence of the rumen methanogen Methanobacterium formicicum BRM9. Standards in Genomic Sciences 9, article 15.
