Current Approaches to Engineering N-Linked Protein Glycosylation in Bacteria

N-Linked protein glycosylation is a common posttranslational protein modification in eukaryotes involved in many biological processes. As glycosylation is also important for the function and the pharmacokinetic properties of many protein therapeutics, there is an increasing interest in expression systems able to produce glycoproteins of well-defined structure. Bacterial expression hosts generally do not glycosylate proteins at all. However, the discovery of bacterial N-glycosylation systems has opened up a new route for the production of therapeutically interesting glycoproteins in glyco-engineered bacteria. This review offers an introduction to the many efforts taken to engineer bacteria in order to produce N-glycoproteins with defined eukaryotic glycan structures, completely novel protein glycoconjugates as well as to establish screening approaches for improvement and adaptation of the glycosylation machinery to specific applications.