Saturday, 16 July 2016

Before Cloning….

For using restriction enzymes to digest and ligate genes of interest into plasmid vectors, it is good practice to check if your restriction enzyme(s) of choice also cuts at regions other than those intended. For standard commercial vectors, these usually have a multiple cloning site (MCS) region containing unique restriction sites where the corresponding enzyme will only cut. However, if you opt to use an enzyme whose site is not present in the MCS, you will need to check if your enzyme(s) of choice cuts anywhere else on the vector.

For your insert, if you decide to engineer restriction sites onto the 5’ and 3’ ends, it is better to (1) choose sites that do not cut anywhere in the insert and (2) make sure the restriction site you are incorporating correspond to what is present in the MCS of the vector.

Some good online tools that are freely available to use for identifying restriction sites in DNA sequences include:


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