A
new technique for manipulating small cell structures for use in a range of
biotechnical applications including the production of biofuels and vaccines has
been developed by a team of scientists led by the University of Kent.
The
researchers did this by creating an improved system to allow for the synthesis
of nano-reactors within cells that can be used to help convert sugar into fuel.
The same technology can be used to coat nano-particles with proteins so that
they can be used to generate vaccines.
The
researchers redesigned and engineered the tiny bacterial cellular structures --
known as organelles -- so they can be more easily manipulated and deployed to
turn bacteria into 'cell factories'.
The
organelles, which are approximately 100 nm in diameter and known as bacterial
microcompartments (BMCs), naturally house specific metabolic pathways,
essentially a linked series of chemical reactions. Although BMCs have huge
potential in the area of biotechnology, a key obstacle to their utilisation is
the difficulty of targeting new pathways and processes into the BMC in a
controllable fashion.
To
address this problem, researchers at Kent's School of Biosciences redesigned a
key surface component of the BMC that enables them to not only internalise
proteins within the BMC but also display them on the surface of the organelle.
To
achieve this the Kent researchers, working with others from University College
London, the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London, utilised
a pair of interacting peptides, developed at Bristol, to target proteins to
these intracellular organelles. This technology facilitated the display of
proteins on the surface of BMCs.
The
use of synthetic biology then allowed the researchers to remodel one of the
components of the BMC shell which in turn allowed them to use the same technology
to internalise proteins within BMCs.
See:
Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle,
Pharmaceutical Microbiology