A genetic toolbox for the high-resolution engineering of the plant growth-promoting agricultural bacterium Azospirillum brasilense.

Abstract

Azospirillum brasilense is an important plant-growth promoting bacterium found in the rhizosphere and used extensively in commercial agriculture. It is an attractive candidate for use in the development of novel crop interventions, such as the targeted delivery of plant hormones and similar compounds to the roots, shoots or leaves, or the introduction of smart bacterial sensors and actuators in the rhizosphere. In order to be able to engineer A. brasilense with these novel and complex behaviours, we require a collection of predictable and reliable genetic parts, consisting of constitutive and inducible promoters, terminators, and a stable expression plasmid. To date, such a genetic toolkit does not exist for the genus. In this work, for the first time we have designed and tested a synthetic constitutive promoter library with a wide-range of transcriptional strengths, a tightly-regulated inducible promoter with a non-metabolisable inducer, strong Rho-independent transcriptional terminators and synthetic small RNAs for post-transcriptional regulation.. We have adapted them for use in a one-pot assembly method and demonstrated their utility in the overproduction of the important plant hormone, indole 3-acetic acid (IAA).