title: Production of bacterial microcompartments.
abstract: Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) are protein-based organelles that allow specific metabolic steps to be sequestered from the cytoplasmic environment. Compartmentalization of enzymes and pathway intermediates can increase flux through a metabolic pathway and protect the cell from toxic intermediates. BMCs thus offer the potential to increase the efficiency of engineered metabolic pathways. Moreover, as protein cages, BMCs may enable various other applications in biotechnology. These future applications of BMCs will require the ability to rapidly and efficiently produce BMCs for physical characterization and protein engineering. This chapter presents an analysis of approaches to expression and purification of BMCs and outlines a generalized strategy based on these approaches that can be used as a starting point for production of new BMCs.
authors.affiliation: Genencor Technology Center, DuPont Industrial Biosciences, 925 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA, 94304, USA, jklassila@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jonathan K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Lassila
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism*; D001426:Bacterial Proteins / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics* / Q000302:isolation & purification / Q000378:metabolism*; D015870:Gene Expression; D015388:Organelles / Q000648:ultrastructure; D015202:Protein Engineering / Q000379:methods
chemical_list: D001426:Bacterial Proteins