(48h) Functional Self-Assembly of Artificial Cellulosomes for Efficient Cellulose Hydrolysis

Efficient hydrolysis of cellulose to glucose is gaining momentum because of its significant role in biofuel production. Cellulosome is a naturally occurring multi-enzyme system with a substantially enhanced ability for cellulose hydrolysis due to the effect of substrate targeting and enzyme clustering. The major component of cellulosome is a structural scaffoldin that consists of at least one cellulose binding module (CBM) and repeating cohesin domains, which are docked individually with an enzyme tagged with a corresponding dockerin domain. Although artificial cellulosomes containing at most four enzymes and a CBM have been constructed with up to 4-fold improvement in hydrolysis efficiency, efforts to engineer more complex cellulosome structures have been lacking. In this talk, we will highlight our recent strategies in engineering more complex artificial cellulosome structures using either protein or DNA as the template. The effect of enzyme loading and ordering on the overall enhancement in cellulose hydrolysis will be discussed.