This technology provides a fast and highly efficient way to transport DNA sequences into multi-vector systems for functional analysis and protein expression using Gateway att sites and two proprietary enzyme mixes called BP Clonase and LR Clonase.
DNA sequences of interest are added to modified versions of these special Gateway Att sites.
This reaction is catalyzed by the BP Clonase enzyme mixture and produces the entry clone containing the DNA of interest flanked by attL domains.
Large archives of Gateway Entry clones, containing the vast majority of human, mouse, and rat ORFs (open reading frames) have been cloned from human cDNA libraries or chemically synthesized to support the research community using NIH (National Institutes of Health) funding (e.g. Mammalian Gene Collection, http://mgc.nci.nih.gov/ Archived 2015-02-25 at the Wayback Machine).
The technology has been widely adopted by the life science research community especially for applications that require the transfer of thousands of DNA fragments into one type of plasmid (e.g., one containing a CMV promoter for protein expression in mammalian cells), or for the transfer of one DNA fragment into many different types of plasmids (e.g., for bacterial, insect, and mammalian protein expression).
Thousands of Gateway Destination plasmids have been made and are freely shared amongst researchers across the world.