Team:Korea U Seoul/Project/Application

Our protein whip platform that is sortase-based surface modified pili display is worthy of note in that many types of enzymes can be applied to our platform for enzymatic pili display. That is, with just a simple specific amino acid sequence, any enzymes can be made into pili form, resulting in mass production of enzymatic product, with constant supply of its substrate. For example, substitution of SpaA with agarose would result in agarose degrading bacteria, which can be economically valuable when commercialized. Also, with poly-His tag or cysteine, we can build up heavy metal binding bacteria.

Our study challenges the typical synthetic biology by using novel gram positive bacteria, C. glutamicum, to develop our protein whip platform, sortase based surface display. This broadens the usage of model organism in synthetic biology, which could contribute to the development of synthetic biology. We expect optimized results for enzymatic process by using C. glutamicum that is confirmed to be suitable for industrial mass production.