This award supports cooperative research in bacterial genetics to be carried out by James Hoch of the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California and Diego de Mendoza of the Department of Microbiology at the National University of Rosario, Argentina. The research goal is to develop an in-vivo method of cloning Gram-positive organisms in general and in particular, Bacillus subtilis. This procedure will eliminate the problems and artifacts involved in present methods which require Gram-negative hosts for the production of recombinant vectors. This research will bring together two laboratories which have differing expertise to produce a new generation of genetic technology for Gram-positive organisms. Dr. de Mendoza spent from 1980 to 1983 as a postdoc at the University of Illinois and since then has been developing in-vivo cloning vectors derived from bacteriophages. Such cloning can be accomplished without expensive and difficult to obtain enzymes and biologicals as used in in-vitro construction of recombinant DNA vectors. In addition he has performed genetic and biochemical studies of lipid metabolism in B. subtilis. Dr. Hoch is a geneticist whose laboratory has cloned and sequenced a large number of B. subtilis genes and has constructed the first library of B. subtilis DNA. The technology developed in this work by two scientists whose expertise is complementary will be applicable to other Gram-positive organisms including the Streptococcus species important for the production of milk products and cheese. For both the scientific reasons and such applications, this work will have a world wide benefit.
