After data screening on the journal’ s website and CNKI website, reviews by the editorial board, public voting and other procedures, ten excellent papers were finally awarded the ‘Outstanding Papers of 2024 in Synthetic Biology Journal’. A research paper entitled ‘Efficient capture and assembly of AT-rich genomic fragments using ExoCET-BAC strategy’ from Hailong Wang Lab of the State Key Laboratory of Microbiology Technology of Shandong University, published in the first issue of Synthetic Biology Journal in 2022, was one of the ten outstanding papers. Prof. Hailong Wang and Youming Zhang are the corresponding authors, and Postdoc Chanjuan Jiang is the first author. This work was supported by Prof. Nianzhi Jiao, from Xiamen University and Shandong University and Prof. Jun Fu from Shandong University.

Gene cloning is an important way to elucidate their functions, however, many genes are difficult to be cloned, such as those from AT-rich (>60%) genome. ExoCET cloning method combines in vitro homologous recombination mediated by exonucleases and intracellular homologous recombination mediated by E. coli RecET recombinases. So far, there has been no report on the use of ExoCET to clone large fragments from genomes with AT content more than 63%. In this study, the genome of the marine cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus MIT 9301 strain with 69% AT content was used to optimize the ExoCET conditions for cloning of large AT-rich DNA fragments. The results showed that: (1) Higher cloning efficiency was obtained when the Gibson assembly method was used for the in vitro homologous recombination than the T4 polymerase method; (2) The single-copy bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) vector should be used and the multi-copy plasmid vector cannot clone them; (3) The ExoCET-BAC strategy can not only capture fragments larger than 80 kb from the Prochlorococcus genome, but also assemble 11 pieces of DNA fragments with 100% accuracy; (4) ExoCET-BAC can capture 4 pieces of genomic fragments ranging 7-20 kb simultaneously in one step. Genome sequencing revealed that AT-rich organisms account for more than 30%. The ExoCET-BAC strategy established in this study provides efficient enabling technology for genome functional research of AT-rich organisms.

The Outstanding Papers of 2024 in Synthetic Biology Journal was selected from papers published in this journal from 2022 to 2023. Synthetic Biology Journal is a journal of Chinese Society of Biotechnology, and is currently the only Chinese scientific journal focusing on the field of synthetic biology in China. Since established in 2020, it has officially published 27 issues of paper journals having 337 papers, and 396 papers online. It has broad influence in the field of synthetic biology and has been included in Peking University Core Journals, The key magazine of China technology, Chinese Science Citation Database and CAS Database.