Use Of Synthetic Scaffolds Composed Of Modular Protein-protein Interaction Motifs As A Post-translational Means Of Balancing Metabolic Pathway Flux

University of California System: University of California, Berkeley
posted on 03/01/2010

• request more info 
•   
•  LICENSE ONLINE

  Engineered biosynthetic pathways utilize enzymes foreign to

the genetically engineered host cell to produce large quantities of desired
products, however, this leads to several problems for the host organism: flux
imbalance, toxicity from metabolite intermediates and / or burden from protein
over expression.   The current
practice to limit these effects is to modulate protein expression levels
through plasmid copy number and promoter strength.   However, this type of optimization can be experimentally
tedious, especially for multi-enzyme pathways.
 
Scientists at UC Berkeley have developed synthetic protein
scaffolds that organize pathway enzymes into a functional complex in a
restricted space, so that there is control over the ratio of enzymes allowing
balanced flux and optimized product yields, while minimizing host toxicity.