The Gibson Assembly Method described by Gibson et al. [1] is
a rapid assembly method that provides directional cloning of
multiple DNA fragments in a single reaction, without the need
for specific restriction sequences. It relies on use of an enzyme
mixture consisting of a mesophilic exonuclease, a ther
mophilic
ligase, and a high-fidelity polymerase.
For the assembly reaction, the gBlocks Gene Fragments and the
vector insertion site are designed with overlapping sequences
at the locations that are to be joined. At 50 ̊C, the exonuclease
digests dsDNA from the 5’ ends, but is rapidly degraded leaving
complementary, 3’ ssDNA ends. The resulting single-stranded,
complementary ends are then availible to hybridize to each
other, at which point the polymerase fills in missing nucleotides
and the ligase covalently joins the fragments together.