Lakhasly

Minimalism is an artistic as well as a functional design ideal [6] that provides enhanced robustness and utility in many fields of engineering (often referred to as the KISS principle, an acronym with many different interpretations but with the same essential meaning: keep it small and simple).

Minimalism is an artistic as well as a
functional design ideal [6] that provides
enhanced robustness and utility in many
fields of engineering (often referred to as
the KISS principle, an acronym with many
different interpretations but with the same
essential meaning: keep it small and simple).
The ideal is often summarized by a quote
from the French poet Antoine de Saint
Exupéry: “It seems that perfection is attained
not when there is nothing more to add, but
when there is nothing more to remove” [7].
In the software world, useless code and
functions are often referred to as ‘bloat’,
and some software projects have simplicity
and minimalism as core values in their development philosophy [8,9]. Just like useless
and bloated code in software, superfluous
genetic material in plasmids can cause
‘bugs’, like the unintended eukaryotic
transcription factor binding sites present in
the pUC plasmids [10,11].
We have therefore applied the minimalistic philosophy in the design of a high-copy
cloning plasmid backbone with as little ‘bloat’
as possible, which opens up for improved
downstream applications. Minivectors
have been found to be highly efficient for
mammalian cell transfection [12] and in
vivo for gene therapy [13]. Tiny plasmids
are, however, not only found in a laboratory
settings, replicating minimal plasmids
down to 746 bp but have also been found
in nature [14]. It is, however, still unclear
how useful these natural minimal plasmids
could be for molecular biology applications.
Nevertheless, there may be further room for
improvement with regards to miniaturization
of useful artificial plasmids, which we invite
the research community to explore further
in an open, distributed manner.