Easy and Efficient Permeabilization of Cyanobacteria for in vivo Enzyme Assays Using B-PER

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic bacteria that thrive in diverse ecosystems and play major roles in the global carbon cycle. The abilities of cyanobacteria to fix atmospheric CO₂ and to allocate the fixed carbons to chemicals and biofuels have attracted growing attentions as sustainable microbial cell factories. A better understanding of activities of enzymes involved in the central carbon metabolism might lead to increased product yields. Currently, cell-free lysates are widely used for the determination of intracellular enzyme activities. However, due to thick cell walls in cyanobacteria, lysis of cyanobacterial cells is inefficient and often laborious. The present protocol describes an easy and efficient method to permeabilize cyanobacterial cells, without lysing them, and direct usage of the permeabilized cells for the determination of metabolic enzyme activities in vivo.