Scientists at the universities of Kent and Bristol have built a miniature scaffold inside bacteria that can be used to bolster cellular productivity, with implications for the next generation of biofuel production (Nature Chemical Biology, “Engineered synthetic scaffolds for organizing proteins within the bacterial cytoplasm”).

Because there is a growing need for agricultural or renewable production of biofuels and other commodity chemicals to move away from fossil fuels, scientists have long sought to enhance the internal organisation of bacteria and improve the efficiency of the cells for making nutrients, pharmaceuticals and chemicals.

The research team, led by Professor Martin Warren at Kent’s School of Biosciences, working with professors Dek Woolfson and Paul Verkade at Bristol, found they could make nanotubes that generated a scaffold inside bacteria.
With as many as a thousand tubes fitting into each cell, the tubular scaffold can be used to increase the bacteria’s efficiency to make commodities and provide the foundation for a new era of cellular protein engineering.

Image Credit:  Kareem Ebeid/UI College of Pharmacy

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