The Marchantia OpenPlant toolkit is a set of interlinked resources and techniques to develop Marchantia as testbed for bioengineering in plants. Marchantia is a liverwort, a simple plant with an open form of development that allows direct visualization of gene expression and dynamics of cellular growth in living tissues. We have built robust Loop assembly vector systems for nuclear and chloroplast transformation and genome editing. These have provided the basis for building and testing a modular library of standardized DNA elements with highly desirable properties. We have screened transcriptomic data to identify a range of candidate genes, extracted putative promoter sequences, and tested them in vivo to identify new constitutive promoter elements. The resources have been combined into a toolkit for plant bioengineering that is accessible for laboratories without access to traditional facilities for plant biology research. The toolkit is being made available under the terms of the OpenMTA and will facilitate the establishment of common standards and the use of this simple plant as testbed for synthetic biology.
Associated Information on OpenPlant: https://www.openplant.org/blog/2020/3/17/marchantia-toolkit Public Benchling Folder: https://benchling.com/susana/f_/1ptxoMWP-openplant-kit/
high-copy-number ColE1/pMB1/pBR322/pUC origin of replication 2
high-copy-number ColE1/pMB1/pBR322/pUC origin of replication