Abstract
Bacterial microcompartments (BMC) are organelles used by bacteria to create micro-environments inside the cell with specific characteristics and composition. BMCs have significant potential in biotechnological applications, since they can be engineered into nano-reactors for the synthesis of industrial products or into nano-capsules for the storage and transport of drugs. The ability to control the microcompartment assembly, shape, properties and disassembly will lead to new applications. The aim of this project is to combine computational and experimental techniques to make synthetic microcompartments with new functions.
References
- Frank, S., Lawrence, A. D., Prentice, M. B., & Warren, M. J. (2013). Bacterial microcompartments moving into a synthetic biological world. Journal of Biotechnology, 163(2), 273–279.
- Pang, A., Frank, S., Brown, I., Warren, M. J., & Pickersgill, R. W. (2014). Structural insights into higher order assembly and function of the bacterial microcompartment protein PduA. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 289(32), 22377–22384.
- Pandini, A., & Fornili, A. (2016). Using Local States To Drive the Sampling of Global Conformations in Proteins. Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, 12(3), 1368–1379.
- Pang, A., Liang, M., Prentice, M. B., & Pickersgill, R. W. (2012). Substrate channels revealed in the trimeric Lactobacillus reuteribacterial microcompartment shell protein PduB. Acta Crystallographica Section D Biological Crystallography, 68(12), 1642–1652.
- Pang, A., Warren, M. J., & Pickersgill, R. W. (2011). Structure of PduT, a trimeric bacterial microcompartment protein with a 4Fe–4S cluster-binding site. Acta Crystallographica Section D Biological Crystallography, 67(2), 91–96.