Abstract

There are a plethora of enzymes that occur in the natural world which perform reactions that could be immensely useful to humans. Unfortunately the efficiency of some of these reactions may render their applications logistically unrealistic. The cellulosome scaffolding protein produced by Clostridium thermocellum has been shown to significantly increase the efficiency of the organism’s own cellulose-degrading enzymes. This protein has the potential to be adapted for Escherichia coli and used to increase the efficiency of other multi-enzymatic reactions. By reducing the overall size of the protein and introducing a greater variety of cohesion sites, it may be possible to construct a cell surface display protein that allows significant manipulation of any appropriately modified enzymes. The project will reduce the size of the scaffolding protein and develop an anchoring protein that is compatible with the cell surface of E. coli. In the future, it may be possible to produce a collection of Bio-Brick parts that would allow teams to make adjustments to the arrangement and concentration of enzymatic subunits. This would not only increase the efficiency of multi-enzyme reactions, but also allow teams to better understand and characterize their parts.