ABSTRACT
Recently, several advances in techniques to analyze genes and their functions for clostridia have been developed. In 1993, Mermelstein and Papoutsakis described an electroporation protocol for C. acetobutylicum that facilitated gene overexpression in C. acetobutylicum via plasmid DNA [1]. Another major advance involves the use of nonreplicative and replicative integrational plasmids to knock out specific clostridial genes by homologous recombination [2,3]. These developments in gene analysis techniques for clostridia have been reviewed extensively [4,5]. Three new exciting tools, gene expression reporter systems, antisense RNA, and large-scale transcriptional analyses using DNA microarrays have also been recently developed for the examination of gene function in clostridia and will be discussed in detail in this chapter. These tools will allow us to understand promoter regulation, assign functions to previously unknown genes, and develop new hypotheses for describing cellular processes.
