483: Recycling Resources Raises Robustness

This episode: Adding tags to proteins to increase their
degradation can help engineered bacteria grow and survive better
under various conditions!


Download Episode (7.3 MB, 10.4 minutes)

Show notes:
Microbe of the episode: Lactococcus virus sk1


News item


Takeaways





Engineering bacteria with new genetic pathways allows us to
use them in many new and promising applications. Some of
these are industrial fermentations, growing large
quantities of bacteria to use as catalysts for production
of chemicals of interest, such as biofuels. But in other
cases, engineered microbes can be most useful in less
controlled environments, such as the soil. In these
situations, the engineering can throw off their natural
metabolic balance, making them less tolerant of the
stresses of such environments.

In this study, a solution to this issue was tested using
protein tags that signal the bacterial enzymes to degrade
the engineered proteins. A variety of tags allowed for a
variety of rates of degradation, allowing engineers to tune
in the ideal rate. Bacteria with these engineered tags grew
better in nutrient limited conditions than those without.


 
Journal Paper:
Szydlo K, Ignatova Z, Gorochowski TE. 2022. Improving the
Robustness of Engineered Bacteria to Nutrient Stress Using
Programmed Proteolysis. ACS Synth Biol 11:1049–1059.

 


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Microbes found in tap water could influence
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