Run, Don't Walk

System speeds up the pace of sequencing

Schematic of New England Biolab's Genome Priming System

Transposons are nothing new to molecular biologists--they have been used since the early 1970s for creating mutations, as well as for moving sequences from place to place in vivo. In the Genome Priming System (GPS^™), New England BioLabs (NEB) has developed a novel, in vitro application of transposons for the production of sequencing templates. GPS replaces primer walking, nested deletions, and random subcloning, all of which can be tedious and time consuming, through the random insertion of a sequencing primer site--bearing transposon into a target DNA.

Transposition can be a complicated process, requiring as many as four proteins and often resulting in complex products. But recently, Nancy Craig and Anne Stellwagen^1,2 from Johns Hopkins University isolated a mutant that will transpose in vitro through a simple procedure to yield simple products. NEB's...