posted on 2023-11-13, 12:40authored byThuc Toan Pham, Satoshi Abe, Koki Date, Kunio Hirata, Taiga Suzuki, Takafumi Ueno
The
development of solid biomaterials has rapidly progressed in
recent years in applications in bionanotechnology. The immobilization
of proteins, such as enzymes, within protein crystals is being used
to develop solid catalysts and functionalized materials. However,
an efficient method for encapsulating protein assemblies has not yet
been established. This work presents a novel approach to displaying
protein cages onto a crystalline protein scaffold using in-cell protein
crystal engineering. The polyhedra crystal (PhC) scaffold, which displays
a ferritin cage, was produced by coexpression of polyhedrin monomer
(PhM) and H1-ferritin (H1–Fr) monomer in Escherichia
coli. The H1-tag is derived from the H1-helix of PhM. Our
technique represents a unique strategy for immobilizing protein assemblies
onto in-cell protein crystals and is expected to contribute to various
applications in bionanotechnology.