ScienceCentric.com
06/09/2010
Scientists at the University of Kent and University College Cork have manipulated simple bacteria into constructing internal compartments where biofuels and vaccines can be produced.
These micro-compartments eventually occupy almost 70 percent of the available space in a bacteria cell, enabling segregation of metabolic activities and, in the era of synthetic biology, representing an important tool by which defined micro-environments can be created for specific metabolic functions.
Martin Warren, Professor of Biochemistry at the School of Biosciences, University of Kent, explained: ‘Synthetic biology is really exciting because we can produce some important and useful products that can be difficult and expensive to make using traditional chemistry techniques. Bacteria can make these things very easily and in large quantities if we develop bacteria with the right characteristics to do so efficiently.
‘What we often do is to make sure that the desired product is made within one or more tiny compartments that already exist inside the bacteria. This means that the process doesn’t get caught up or slowed down by everything else that is going on in the cell and so is much more efficient.’
Read the rest of the article.