Primary Concerns:
- Ease of Culture
- Almost all candidates are anaerobic; not what we're used to but should be doable
- Several are thermophiles; what temperatures do they operate in?
- Thermoanaerobacterium Thermosaccharolyticum may need to be grown at 70C!!!
- How "engineerable" are they?
- Can they be transformed? How?
- Clostridium appears to have been pretty well characterized
- Have genes from other species (particularly bacteria that are NOT gram positive) been expressed in them?
- Can they be transformed? How?
- Availability of background info on species
- genome sequence, etc.
Shuttle vector for clostridium: http://2013.igem.org/files/presentation/OU-Norman_OK.pdf
It looks like we want to go with the C. butyricum + R. sphaeroides system
- Better characterized, less insane growth conditions