pSC101 is a

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of al ...

plasmid A plasmid is a small, extrachromosomal DNA molecule within a cell that is physically separated from chromosomal DNA and can replicate independently. They are most commonly found as small circular, double-stranded DNA molecules in bacteria and ...

that is used as a

cloning Cloning is the process of producing individual organisms with identical genomes, either by natural or artificial means. In nature, some organisms produce clones through asexual reproduction; this reproduction of an organism by itself without ...

vector Vector most often refers to: * Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction * Disease vector, an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematics a ...

in genetic cloning experiments. pSC101 was the first cloning vector, used in 1973 by

Herbert Boyer Herbert Wayne "Herb" Boyer (born July 10, 1936) is an American biotechnologist, researcher and entrepreneur in biotechnology. Along with Stanley N. Cohen and Paul Berg, he discovered recombinant DNA, a method to coax bacteria into producing for ...

and

Stanley Norman Cohen Stanley Norman Cohen (born February 17, 1935) is an American geneticist and the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living o ...

. Using this plasmid they have demonstrated that a

gene In biology, the word gene has two meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity. The molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA. There are two types of molecular genes: protei ...

from a frog could be transferred into bacterial cells and then expressed by the bacterial cells. The plasmid is a natural plasmid from ''Salmonella panama''.

History

In the early 1970s,

and

produced pSC101, the first plasmid vector for cloning purposes. Soon after successfully cloning two pSC101 plasmids together to create one large plasmid, they published the results describing the experiment, in 1973. The cloning of genes into plasmids occurred soon after. In 1980, pSC101 became the first patented commercial DNA cloning vector when patents were awarded to Boyer and Cohen. The "SC" stands for Stanley Cohen. Although the original pSC101 only contained tetracycline resistance and a restriction site for EcoRI, the commercially available pSC101 gained restriction sites for several enzymes, including HindIII, in addition to the EcoRI site.

Usage

Certain mutants of the pSC101 replication protein RepA are heat sensitive and can not stably maintain the plasmid in bacteria when grown at temperatures above 37C. This property can be used to "cure" bacteria transformed with plasmids using the pSC101 origin of replication by growing them at an elevated temperature, typically 42C.

References

Molecular genetics 1973 in biotechnology Plasmids {{genetics-stub