Project Description

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.

To begin with, our team aims to produce a BMC comprised of the seven Salmonella Pdu proteins (Pdu-A, -B, -J, -K, -N, -T, -U) in Escherichia coli, which itself is a close relative of Salmonella. Our intention is to add a poly-histidine affinity tag onto each of the compartment proteins. This will aid in determining whether the proteins have been expressed and may allow us to isolate complete compartments from the cell by affinity purification

Once the BMC is expressed and characterised, we would like to take the project in a number of different directions as we feel the microcompartment has broad potential. For example, we would like to explore the idea of making the compartments magnetic by targeting iron-rich proteins to them. This would allow us to collect the bacteria and/or compartments using a magnet after they have carried out their task, which could be a very useful attribute (e.g. in bioremediation). In conjunction with biobricks made by other iGEM groups in the past, we aim to expand our BMC approach into a wide variety of new applications and (hopefully!) present our ideas at MIT.

Through collaboration with expert applied computing scientists, we hope to develop software, which will help in the design and construction of our biobricks. They are also the ones responsible for the design of this superb website!