Begin by pipetting out 0.5 milliliters of a log phase culture of chlorella vulgaris. Spread the culture on at Tris-Acetate-Phosphate or TAP Agar plate. Grow the culture for five days at 25 degrees Celsius.
Next, inoculate 10 milliliters of supplemented LB broth with a loop full of electroporated agrobacterium tumefaciens culture in a shaker flask. Incubate the flask at 28 to 30 degrees Celsius and 250 RPM overnight. The next day, inoculate one milliliter of the overnight culture into 50 milliliters of supplemented LB.Incubate the flask at 28 to 30 degrees Celsius and 250 RPM.
To co-cultivate the algal and bacterial cultures. First, transfer the agrobacterium culture into a 50 milliliter tube. Centrifuge the tube at 4, 000 G for 30 minutes at room temperature.
Then, pipette out the supernatant to discard it and wash the cells twice using the induction medium. Next, add 25 milliliters of induction media onto the Chlorella Vulgaris culture plate. Transfer the cells into a 50 milliliter tube, then centrifuge at 4, 000 G for 15 minutes at room temperature.
After disposing of the supernatant, combine the algal cell pellet with 200 microliters of the bacterial suspension. Shake the combined culture in a rotary incubator at 21 to 25 degrees Celsius, said at 150 RPM for one hour. Spread 200 microliters of the mixed culture onto induction medium plates, supplemented with 15 millimoles of glucose and incubate the plates in the dark at 21 to 25 degrees Celsius for three days.
After three days, collect the microalgae into a flask using 10 milliliters of TAP media. Supplemented with 20 milligrams per liter of tetracycline. Incubate the flask in the dark for two days, maintaining a temperature between 21 to 25 degrees Celsius.
Plate 500 microliters of the culture onto selective media supplemented with 20 milligrams per liter of tetracycline. Incubate the plates at 21 to 25 degrees Celsius in darkness for two days, before shifting them into an illuminated chamber. Select single colonies from the transformation plate and streak them onto TAP agar plates.
To perform colony PCR, start by adding a small volume of the transformant algal cells to 10 microliters of sterile water. Boil the solution at 98 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes. Similarly process another PCR template for the confirmation of agrobacterium absence in the sample.
Run the PCR samples on a DNA agarose gel with a ladder, to verify the size of the resulting fragments. Transformed colonies were able to grow on plates containing hygromycin with cefotaxime. The wild type colonies did not grow on the plates.
Colonies resistant up to 70 milligrams per liter of cefotaxime were obtained. Colony PCR Amplicon of pCAMBIA1302 was absent in the algal samples. However MGFP5G in amplicon was detected in all three algal samples.
Algal cultures that were repeatedly subcultures of Cefotaxime showed the absence of the virulence protein E2, indicative of plasmid absence. A significant difference in algal growth of the transformants and wild type strains were observed. Despite lower growth, the transformant had higher fluorescence levels when normalized for cell density.
