Enhancing Intercellular Coordination: Rewiring Quorum Sensing Networks for Increased Protein Expression through...

Area of Science:

• Synthetic Biology
• Microbial Engineering
• Biotechnology

Background:

• Industrial protein production often relies on expensive inducing agents.
• Quorum sensing (QS) systems offer a self-regulating alternative for controlling gene expression.
• Previous work established an AI-2-based QS system in E. coli for autonomous protein production.

Purpose of the Study:

• To engineer a novel QS-enabled system with enhanced feedback mechanisms.
• To reduce cell heterogeneity and improve the uniformity of protein expression within a population.
• To increase per-cell and overall protein productivity for bioprocessing.

Main Methods:

• Rewiring E. coli's native quorum sensing (QS) signal transduction cascade.
• Developing a QS system with enhanced intercellular feedback loops.
• Analyzing population distributions of protein expression to assess heterogeneity.

Main Results:

• The new QS system successfully reduced cell heterogeneity.
• A narrower population distribution of protein expression was achieved.
• Significant increases in both per-cell and overall protein productivity were observed.

Conclusions:

• Directed engineering of QS systems can effectively control cell populations for bioprocessing.
• Enhanced feedback in QS systems leads to more uniform and productive microbial cell factories.
• This approach presents a cost-effective and scalable alternative to traditional inducing agents.