Team:Korea U Seoul/Project/sub desc

Enzyme purification is costly, and purified enzymes cannot be used multiple times due to decrease in activity after few reactions. To overcome this problem, ‘whole-cell biocatalysis’, which uses the microorganism itself as a catalyst, was introduced. Related to this, ‘Cell surface display’ can provide higher rate of access to the substrate, but due to the possibility of toxicity, its result has a low rate of actual expression rate. To make more efficient and stable surface display system,“sortase-based surface display at gram-positive bacteria” has been researched in many fields lately. Sortase functions as ‘protein ligase’ that recognizes specific amino acids sequence(LPXT) of each peptides and links them together. It is also associated with cell wall-bound protein and pili synthesis. ‘Sortase-based surface display’ can induce stable enzyme surface display by reducing cell toxicity and holding enzymes tightly to the cell wall with covalent bond.
However, it cannot overcome low display yield and it should include an extra step of treating sortase in vitro. Therefore, referring to sortase-based study, we are going to make enzyme polymer (enzyme pili) on cell wall by modifying pili units used in pili synthesis in other species in Corenebacterium genus. This study provides more efficient way of enzymatic process and application of pili biosynthesis

(Pilus genes of Corynebacterium diphtheriae are potentially harmful when present in the genomic DNA of C. diphtheriae strain that secretes Diphtheria toxin. But we decided to make something good out of them.)
The main objective of our project is to construct a novel “protein whip” platform, with which we can make Corynebacterium glutamicum to express other corynebacterium’s pili structure comprised of chains of a protein of our choice. As our first try, we decided to make pili made out of green fluorescence proteins (GFP); in order to do so, we substituted SpaA protein, one of the surface proteins in the Pilin A gene cluster, into green fluorescence protein, and transformed a vector containing the modified Pilin A gene cluster into a C. glutamicum strain.
Our “protein whip” platform is expected to have many practical applications. For example, pili made out of an enzyme, enzyme whip will enable the reaction to take place with high efficiency, for a great number of the enzyme included in the pili will be able to “attack” the reactants simultaneously. Biofilms made of strains of bacteria that express pili comprised of chains of specific amino acids such as histidine or cysteine that readily bind to heavy metals may be utilized to purify water contaminated with heavy metals.
Having a number of potential applications is not the sole merit of our project; by using C. glutamicum instead of widely exploited Escherichia coli, our project also contributes to expanding model organisms used in synthetic biology beyond E. coli.