Gateway to superbug research

Invitrogen's Gateway technology will help researchers at a new £6m lab investigating treatments for superbugs. The Scottish Structural Proteomics Facility (SSPF) laboratory at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) was officially opened in December 2004, and resulting from collaboration with the University of Dundee will conduct critical research that could lead to more effective medicines for dangerous infections such as MRSA.

The lab will house large-scale robotic equipment with cloning and expression technology, and researchers will be using Gateway technology as an alternative to traditional cloning methods to maximise speed and efficiency when cloning DNA sequences for functional analysis.

Gateway technology is a universal cloning and ex-pression method based on the site-specific recombination properties of bacteriophage lambda. It provides a fast and highly efficient way to move a DNA sequence into multiple vector systems for protein expression and functional analysis, without the need for traditional sub-cloning, enabling researchers to move their experiments along rapidly with great consistency.

Systems for entry into Gateway are available for all common cloning techniques, including TOPO, PCR, and restriction cloning. In addition, there are a wide variety of Gateway expression vectors, different types of DNA sequences can be cloned - such as PCR products, cDNA clones, and restriction fragments - while Invitrogen has more than 10,000 ultimate ORFs that are Gateway compatible and ready for sub-cloning. The technology can easily accommodate the transfer of a large number of DNA sequences into multiple expression vectors, making it ideal for high throughput applications, Invitrogen says.