Engineering Bacterial Microcompartments to Shield Toxicity during Protein Expression and Purification

Engineering bacterial microcompartments to shield toxicity during protein expression and purification

M. C. Yung, M. A. Coleman, F. A. Bourguet, T. S. Carpenter
Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) are â??organellesâ? that are natively produced by bacteria to organize and sequester enzymes in a biosynthetic pathway within the confines of a protein shell. BMCs are thought to shield the toxicity of pathway intermediates and increase reaction efficiency. As such, there is
significant interest to engineer BMC shell proteins for biotechnology applications. Here, we express toxic proteins inside BMC shell proteins in E. coli as a platform for protein expression and purification. We demonstrate that BMCs can shield toxicity of these proteins during expression. Our results have broad utility to improve cytoplasmic expression of toxic proteins for protein purification applications.
(Work at LLNL conducted under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. LLNL-ABS-667012.)