Engineered Bacterial Metal-binding Proteins for Nanoscale Self-assembly and heavy Metal Tolerance.

摘要

Implementing biological principles in material synthesis and assembly is one way to expand our abilities to efficiently assemble nanoscale materials and devices. Specifically, recent advances in identifying peptides that bind inorganic materials with high affinity and specificity has spurred investigation of protein models for nanoscale inorganic assembly. This dissertation presents the results of my studies of several E. coli proteins engineered to bind inorganic materials through simple peptide motifs. I demonstrate that these proteins modulate the self-assembly of DNA-based nanostructures and can introduce heavy metal tolerance into metal-sensitive bacteria. Chapter 2 explores use of the engineered F plasmid DNA relaxase/helicase TraI for the self-assembly of complex DNA-protein-gold nanostructures. The full-length protein is engineered with a gold binding motif at an internal permissive site (TraI369GBP1-7x), while a truncated version of TraI is engineered with the same gold binding motif at the C-terminus (TraI361GBP1-7x). Both constructs bind gold nanoparticles while maintaining their DNA binding activity, and transmission electron microscopy reveals TraI369GBP1-7x utilizes its non-specific DNA binding activity to decorate single-stranded and double-stranded DNA with gold nanoparticles. The self assembly principles demonstrated in this work will be fundamental to constructing higher ordered hybrid nanostructures through DNA-protein-nanoparticle interactions. Chapter 3 studies the effects of expressing inorganic binding peptides within cells. I identified a silver binding peptide that, when fused to the periplasmic maltose binding protein, protects E. coli from silver toxicity in batch culture and reduces silver ions to silver nanoparticles within the bacterial periplasm. Engineered metal-ion tolerant microorganisms such as this E. coli could potentially be used in applications ranging from remediation to interrogation of biomolecule-metal interactions in vivo. Further implications of these findings, and possible directions for future study, are discussed in Chapter 4.