Research
We repurpose Bacterial Microcompartments, simple prokaryotic organelles, into Nanofactories for medical applications or Synthetic Cellular Organelles for the sustainable production of valuable chemical compounds.
What are Bacterial Microcompartments (BMCs)?
Bacterial Microcompartments (BMCs), are simple bacterial organelles. In contrast to those of eukaryotes, bacterial microcompartments are not circumscribed by a phospholipid membrane. Instead, the barrier between the lumen of the organelle and the cytosol is formed by a set of proteins that are functionally similar to structural virus proteins but are phylogenetically entirely different. The shell proteins self-assemble into a polyhedral structure about 40 nm in diameter. While the shell architecture is broadly conserved across all BMCs, the encapsulated enzymes vary widely. In general, BMCs are metabolic modules, with the enzymes carrying out a sequence of biochemical reactions, and the shell serving as the interface with the cytosol.
Bacterial microcompartment (BMC) shell schematic illustrating the icosahedral structure of the BMC and its hexagonal and pentagonal protein building blocks. The picture on the right side of the schematic is a structure of the BMC in the same orientation.
BMC-H proteins form hexagons with a central pore (circled) allowing molecules to enter and leave the lumen of the BMC.
BMC-T proteins also form hexagons with pores (circled) which have different properties to the ones within the BMC-H proteins.
BMC-P proteins form pentagons, needed to form a completely sealed BMC shell. They have very small pores (circled).