A Modular, Synthetic Origin of Replication (opens in new tab)

By Baiyang Liu and James Chappell, Rice University. For decades, we’ve been designing experiments around two major limitations of plasmids: copy number and incompatibility. While functional, such workarounds are clunky. To address this, we created a synthetic origin of replication (ORI) that allows us to modify the plasmid instead of the experiment.