Project Brief

Over millennia, eukaryotic cells have evolved sophisticated organelles, which enabled them to partition their cytoplasmic contents into functional sectors (e.g. the nucleus for storage of genetic material).

Such compartmentalisation allows greater efficiency of cellular processes, where each organelle is allocated a set of specific metabolic tasks. Some prokaryotes, such as Salmonella enterica, have also developed a method of forming intracellular subdivisions called bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) by expressing a set of proteins that ‘cage in’ a reaction pathway to make it more efficient.

One such set of proteins is expressed from the propanediol utilisation (pdu) operon, which is normally involved in the breakdown of the organic compound propanediol.