Direct Cloning and Sequencing of Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) Insert Ends Based on Double Digestion

Conventional digestion and ligation was developed into a novel and efficient approach for directly cloning and sequencing the two ends of bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clone inserts. Most BAC vectors have two Not I sites. This end isolation method is based on double digestion of the BAC clone DNA with Not I and any blunt-end restriction enzyme for which there is not a restriction site located within the small fragment (containing the cloning site) between the two Not I sites on the BAC vector. Digestion is followed by ligation of the double-digested mixture with a suitable plasmid vector. The pBeloBAC11 and pBlueScriptII SK vectors were used in the present study. The two ends of the BAC insert can be amplified and sequenced with three specific primers, i.e., amplification of the left end with the pBeloBAC11 LF1 and pBlueScriptII KS primers, and the right end with the pBeloBAC11 RR4 and KS primers. They may be directly recovered by transformation if the end fragments are used as probes. More significantly, this simple strategy generally can be applied to any BAC vector with any cloning site.