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. 2016 Mar 30;5(4):519–528. doi: 10.1242/bio.017129

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© 2016. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.

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Fig. 4. — Autotoxicity triggered by withdrawal of antitoxin inducer in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 cells carrying a plasmid-encoded toxin/antitoxin suicide switch. (A) Diagrammatical representation of the suicide switch. Antitoxin expression is driven by the inducible promoter PcopB and expression of toxin by the constitutive promoter PrnpB-RBS. Antitoxin levels can be reduced upon withdrawal of inducer from the growth medium, allowing the toxin to prevail. Arrow indicates transcriptional start site; hairpin indicates transcription terminator. (B) Growth of wild type Synechocystis (WT) and suicide switch cells (KS) on BG11 plates with or without added Zn²⁺. Inducer limitation in BG11 plates results in autotoxicity of suicide switch cells. (C) Stereomicroscopic evaluation of colonies from agar plates in (B) reveals that kill switch cells (KS) exhibit similar numbers of colony forming units but different growth rates in comparison to wild-type Synechocystis (WT) and empty vector (EV) control.