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.