From dead leaf, to new life: TAL effectors as tools for synthetic biology

Whether rice, yeast or fly there is barely a model organism not yet reached by transcription activator-like effectors (TALEs) and their derivative fusion proteins. Insights into fundamental biology are now arriving on the back of work in recent years to develop these proteins as tools for molecular biology. This began with the publication of the simple cipher determining base-specific DNA recognition by TALEs in 2009, and now encompasses a huge variety of established fusion proteins mediating targeted modifications to transcriptome, genome and, recently, epigenome. Straightforward design and exquisite specificity, allowing unique sites to be targeted even within complex eukaryote genomes, are key to the popularity of this system. Synthetic biology is one field that is just beginning to make use of these properties, with a number of recent publications demonstrating TALE-mediated regulation of synthetic genetic circuits. Intense interest has surrounded the CRISPR/Cas9 system within the last 12 months, and it is already proving its mettle as a tool for targeted gene modifications and transcriptional regulation. However, questions over off-target activity and means for independent regulation of multiple Cas9-guide RNA pairs must be resolved before this method can be included in the synthetic biology toolbox. TALEs are already showing promise as regulators of synthetic biological systems, a role that is likely to be developed further in the coming years.