Hear from the Sternberg Lab at Columbia University

Sam Sternberg’s lab at Columbia University strives to elucidate the inner workings of transposon systems. By understanding the mechanisms governing naturally occurring genomic recombination events, some of which do not require double-strand breaks and are guided by RNA molecules, the Sternberg lab is paving the way to developing new tools to advance precise genome editing.

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GenScript has been invaluable when our research required access to custom synthetic gene sequences, and when outsourcing laborious and time-consuming cloning challenges freed up our efforts to be applied elsewhere.

- Sam Sternberg, Columbia University

Project’s Critical Challenge

Sternberg’s team has a long history of exploring and characterizing naturally occurring bacterial transposon systems. His lab carefully dissects the molecular elements and processes in DNA recombination events involving novel or rarely studied bacterial transposon systems. One fundamental interest has been the characterization of transposon systems encoding unique CRISPR-Cas proteins, which are guided by RNA molecules and capable of various functions, including high-fidelity transpositions or even transcriptional regulation.

To fully understand the properties of new systems, the Sternberg lab leverages transposition assays, which rely on the heterologous expression of all transposon components under study, followed by sequencing analysis. Therefore, Effector plasmids encoding the guide RNA and protein components and Donor plasmids encoding mini-transposon sequences must be developed for heterologous expression. At this critical experimental stage, reliable, high-quality gene synthesis helps the Sternberg group to expedite discoveries.