Structure, function, assembly and engineering of bacterial microcompartments

Microbiology Seminar Series

  • Date: Nov 6, 2017
  • Time: 01:15 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Prof. Cheryl Kerfeld
  • Michigan State University, MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, USA
  • Location: MPI for Terrestrial Microbiology
  • Room: Lecture hall
  • Host: Dr. Tobias Erb
  • Contact: toerb@mpi-marburg.mpg.de

Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) such as carboxysomes are multienzyme-containing proteinaceous organelles. The principles of carboxysome structure, function and assembly likely extend to other bacterial microcompartments of diverse functions. Because BMCs function to organize and protect enzymes and sequester substrates, cofactors, or toxic intermediates, they have received considerable attention as templates for bioengineering synthetic nanoreactors. There are two key challenges: design and assembly of multi-enzyme cores and engineering of the shell proteins to serve as a selectively permeable membrane; our studies are aimed at providing a foundation for design and construction of synthetic nanoreactors based on BMC architectures.

Go to Editor View