School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, United States.
School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, United States.
ACS Synth Biol. 2021 Apr 16;10(4):670-681. doi: 10.1021/acssynbio.0c00625. Epub 2021 Mar 22.
Membrane proteins are present in a wide array of cellular processes from primary and secondary metabolite synthesis to electron transport and single carbon metabolism. A key barrier to applying membrane proteins industrially is their difficult functional production. Beyond expression, folding, and membrane insertion, membrane protein activity is influenced by the physicochemical properties of the associated membrane, making it difficult to achieve optimal membrane protein performance outside the endogenous host. In this review, we highlight recent work on production of membrane proteins in membrane augmented cell-free systems (CFSs) and applications thereof. CFSs lack membranes and can thus be augmented with user-specified, tunable, mimetic membranes to generate customized environments for production of functional membrane proteins of interest. Membrane augmented CFSs would enable the synthesis of more complex plant secondary metabolites, the growth and division of synthetic cells for drug delivery and cell therapeutic applications, as well as enable green energy applications including methane capture and artificial photosynthesis.
膜蛋白存在于多种细胞过程中，从初级和次级代谢物合成到电子传递和单碳代谢。将膜蛋白应用于工业生产的一个主要障碍是其功能生产的难度。除了表达、折叠和膜插入之外，膜蛋白的活性还受到相关膜的物理化学性质的影响，因此很难在天然宿主之外实现最佳的膜蛋白性能。在这篇综述中，我们强调了最近在膜增强无细胞体系（CFS）中生产膜蛋白的工作及其应用。CFS 缺乏膜，因此可以用用户指定的、可调的、模拟的膜来增强，以生成功能膜蛋白的定制环境。膜增强的 CFS 将能够合成更复杂的植物次生代谢物，用于药物输送和细胞治疗应用的合成细胞的生长和分裂，以及实现包括甲烷捕获和人工光合作用在内的绿色能源应用。
