Ribozyme-mediated gene-fragment complementation for non-destructive reporting of DNA transfer within soil

Enzymes that produce volatile metabolites can be coded into genetic circuits to report non-disruptively on microbial behaviors in hard-to-image soils. However, these enzyme reporters remain challenging to apply in gene transfer studies due to leaky off states that can lead to false positives. To overcome this problem, we designed a reporter that uses ribozyme-mediated gene-fragment complementation of a methyl halide transferase (MHT) to regulate the synthesis of methyl halides. We split the mht gene into two non-functional fragments and attached these to a pair of splicing ribozyme fragments. While the individual mht-ribozyme fragments did not produce methyl halides when transcribed alone in Escherichia coli, co-expression resulted in a spliced transcript that translated the MHT reporter. When cells containing one mht-ribozyme fragment transcribed from a mobile plasmid were mixed with cells that transcribed the second mht-ribozyme fragment, methyl halides were only detected following rare conjugation events. When conjugation was performed in soil, it led to a 16-fold increase in methyl halides in the soil headspace. These findings show how ribozyme-mediated gene-fragment complementation can achieve tight control of protein reporter production, a level of control that will be critical for monitoring the effects of soil conditions on gene transfer and the fidelity of biocontainment measures developed for environmental applications.