Re: [DIYbio] New Plant Blog Post!

The common yellow wood sorrel you may he thinking of is Oxalis pes-caprae and was my original target organism. I'd like that one to be the model since almost every region on earth has it in its turf from South America to India and even Australia. Just walk outside and you are bound to bump into this little guy. Commonly mistaken for clovers. It is a more upright variant of the one I am sure I have, O. corniculata, the creeping wood sorrel which is more prostrate and produces more leaves. The genome is not known (nuclear or chloroplast) but there are some vouchers on genbank for the more rudimental coding regions including barcode hotspots like matK and rbcL. I even stumbled upon some interesting antimicrobial, antiinflamatory, and known anti-tumor properties as this ubiquitous weed is used as a medicinal herb in countless cultures. Its also good in salads in moderation as its very high in vitamin C and has a great sour note. Good for quenching thirst. Its drawback as a food and feed stock is the oxalic acid which its namesake elludes to. It reacts with calcium ions in our body/blood to form insoluble calcium oxalate crystals (kidney stones) but you will need massive salads daily to accomplish that feat. Thats why the first thing I want to do is CRISPR out the oxalic acid pathway so sheep wont die from eating this deliciously soft plant. Its more of a "get my hands dirty with CRISPR" than an actual product to market idea.

Since I want to use it as a gene gun model as well, my primary concern is getting more chloroplast sequence data. Even just the intergenic region between tRNA coding sequences would be enough since that's the standard target for homologous recombination in chloroplasts anyway. Just take the whole coding region of two tRNAs and recombine the "junk spacer" in between with your gene of interest. Since the cp is prokaryotic in origin, one could make large monocistronic circuits and have them express using IEEs or inter-exonal elements. Ill touch on that in much more detail in later posts. 

All in all I am excited to add more knowledge to our collective by embarking on this silly journey to take a noxious weed into the model organism spotlight. Sequencing is getting cheaper and there are plenty of places I can ask around that have NGSs and nothing to seq. Until then I'll just primer-walk known sites and expand on them a little. More content soon!

Sebastian S. Cocioba

On Nov 28, 2015, at 4:37 AM, Cathal (Phone) <cathalgarvey@cathalgarvey.me> wrote: