Life Sciences Commons^™

The Development Of Sinorhizobium Meliloti And Deinococcus Radiodurans As Chassis For Synthetic Biology Applications, Stephanie L. Brumwell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Microorganisms can be harnessed for bioproduction and biotechnology to further global efforts in agriculture, health, manufacturing and sustainability. Traditional microbial chassis used for these purposes are the most well-characterized bacteria and yeast, Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Synthetic biology can be used to facilitate engineering of microbial chassis with new or improved traits. However, there is a need to expand the number and diversity of available microbial chassis to include microorganisms that have innate genetic, metabolic and physiological characteristics that we could make use of. Two such bacteria include the nitrogen-fixing plant symbiont, Sinorhizobium meliloti, and the polyextremophile, Deinococcus …

Applications Of Nanopore Dna Sequencing For Improved Genome Assembly, Daniel Giguere

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

An organism's genome is the ultimate determinant of its functional potential. Understanding genomes is therefore essential to understand function, and a foundational knowledge of a genome is required transfer functions to and from microorganisms of interest. Sequencing DNA using nanopores is a recent advance that resolves limitations of previous technologies, enabling an improved understanding of genomes. For this thesis, I improved our understanding of microbial genomes by developing novel approaches to analyze long read sequencing data, setting the foundation for future synthetic biology work.

Long sequencing reads have enabled routine assembly of complete bacterial genomes by directly sequencing DNA extracted …