I like playing around with various recombinant DNA tools to see how they work and figure out if they’ll do something useful for me. Sometimes it works out amazingly, like iCasp9, which is a fantastic negative selection transgene. Other times, it’s not so clearly a success…

I recently ordered RUBY from Addgene (originally used by the depositing lab to darken plant roots) to see if I could turn my cultured cells visibly darker. I had actually messed around a little with this concept previously using tyrosinase, where it worked in making the cells darker, albeit one could only see the darker color either as a centrifuged cell pellet, or perhaps as a large overgrowing “colony” on an originally sparse culture plate. Well, I shuttled RUBY into my recombination vector and selected for cells expressing it. I don’t even think I saw dark cells this time (though I didn’t look very closely, since this is just a fun side-experiment), but I did notice that these cells had much darker media than their recombined siblings, like the cells expressing fluorescent proteins in the two wells to the right of it. So I’m not exactly sure what’s happening, but the chromogenic small molecule is definitely making it out into the culture media.

I guess I’ll just file this observation for now and see if it ever comes in useful at some point the future! hahaha.

Update: FYI, RUBY is *BIG*. Like ~ 4kb kind of big, since it encodes multiple enzymes within a chemical pathway. So def not a small chromoprotein kind of thing.