Protein Organelles, Microbial Metabolism, and Pathogenicity
Cellular compartmentalization and spatial control are defining features of life. Similar to eukaryotes, many prokaryotes compartmentalize their cytosol to carry out specialized metabolic reactions, prevent toxicity and store nutrients. To achieve this goal, prokaryotes rely on protein-based instead of lipid-based strategies. Our main interest currently lies on encapsulin nanocompartments, the newest class of microbial protein organelles. Protein organelles enable specialized biochemistry and are so far known to be involved in nutrient utilization, iron and sulfur metabolism, stress resistance, and secondary metabolite biosynthesis. Our overall goal is to explore and understand the functional diversity of protein compartments, protein organelles, and protein machines, including their roles in pathogenicity and virulence, and to ultimately reveal their contributions towards human health and disease.
#Biochemistry | #Structural Biology | #Microbiology
Engineering Protein Assemblies for Biomedicine and Bionanotechnology
Self-assembly is the common theme connecting various types of protein assemblies ranging from protein compartments to bacteriophages. These large protein complexes possess defined nanoarchitectures of uniform size and shape. Their biological origin makes them inherently biocompatible and allows facile genetic functionalization, thus positioning them as ideal starting points for creative nanoscale and protein engineering approaches. Our overall goal is to design and build protein assemblies to tackle important problems in biomedicine, catalysis, and sustainability. Our efforts will result in novel diagnostics and therapeutics, programmable nanomaterials, nanoreactors, bioremediation approaches, and molecular protein-based tools to advance cell and structural biology.
#Synthetic Biology | #Biological Engineering | #Protein Engineering
Genome Mining, Natural Products, and Combinatorial Biosynthesis
One strategy to address the global problem of increasing microbial antibiotic resistance is the continual discovery of new chemical matter, often found in underexplored niches, and the characterization of enzymes able to specifically tailor these antibiotic scaffolds. Powerful bioinformatics approaches have been developed to reveal and harness the diversity of chemical transformations and entities encoded in microbial genomes, thus allowing us to shed light on what is often referred to as microbial dark matter. We are currently focused on the biosynthesis and diversification of modified cyclic dipeptides and the characterization of their biosynthetic enzymes. This includes unique cyclodipeptide oxidase enzyme filaments. Our overall goal is to discover novel bioactive microbial metabolites, elucidate their biosynthesis, study their bioactivities, and engineer their biosynthetic enzymes for applications in combinatorial biosynthesis, chemoenzymatic synthesis, and biocatalysis.
#Enzymology | #Bioinformatics | #Biocatalysis
