Designing a Customizable Synthetic Cell Compartment Toolbox
Synthetic organisms provide a wide range of applications with the potential to tackle
the biggest challenges humanity faces. Their creation is therefore one of the major
goals in synthetic biology. Many breakthroughs have been achieved in the last
decade, however, the creation of a fully synthetic cell is yet a milestone to reach for.
A common approach tries to build up artificial cells from scratch, whereas we want to
start by engineering artificial compartments through orthogonalization. For designing
these new compartments we plan to establish an open source toolbox accessible to
the community at large. This will make it possible to boot up a compartment perfectly
tailored for a specific application, which will enable cheaper and more efficient
production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals, or high value chemicals.
By integrating enzymes or biosynthetic pathways into semi-permeable organelles we
gain higher concentrations of enzymes and metabolites and provide a basis for the
ideal operation of specialized enzymes. Furthermore, toxic or unstable intermediates
can be sustained and naturally incompatible reactions can take place
simultaneously.
We have chosen yeast peroxisomes as our chassis for designing this synthetic organelle, which are very resistant, have a useful import mechanism and are expendable under optimal conditions.[1]
