The emerging discipline of bacterial glycoengineering has made it possible to produce designer glycans and glycoconjugates for use as vaccines and therapeutics. Unfortunately, cell-based production of homogeneous glycoproteins remains a significant challenge due to cell viability constraints and the inability to control glycosylation components at precise ratios in vivo. To address these challenges, we describe a novel cell-free glycoprotein synthesis (CFGpS) technology that seamlessly integrates protein biosynthesis with asparagine-linked protein glycosylation. This technology leverages a glyco-optimized Escherichia coli strain to source cell extracts that are selectively enriched with glycosylation components, including oligosaccharyltransferases (OSTs) and lipid-linked oligosaccharides (LLOs). The resulting extracts enable a one-pot reaction scheme for efficient and site-specific glycosylation of target proteins. The CFGpS platform is highly modular, allowing the use of multiple distinct OSTs and structurally diverse LLOs. As such, we anticipate CFGpS will facilitate fundamental understanding in glycoscience and make possible applications in on demand biomanufacturing of glycoproteins.

Conjugate vaccines are among the most effective methods for preventing bacterial infections. However, existing manufacturing approaches limit access to conjugate vaccines due to centralized production and cold chain distribution requirements. To address these limitations, we developed a modular technology for in vitro conjugate vaccine expression (iVAX) in portable, freeze-dried lysates from detoxified, nonpathogenic Escherichia coli. Upon rehydration, iVAX reactions synthesize clinically relevant doses of conjugate vaccines against diverse bacterial pathogens in 1 hour. We show that iVAX-synthesized vaccines against Francisella tularensis subsp. tularensis (type A) strain Schu S4 protected mice from lethal intranasal F. tularensis challenge. The iVAX platform promises to accelerate development of new conjugate vaccines with increased access through refrigeration-independent distribution and portable production.

The central enzyme in the Campylobacter jejuni asparagine-linked glycosylation pathway is the oligosaccharyltransferase (OST), PglB, which transfers preassembled glycans to specific asparagine residues in target proteins. While C. jejuni PglB (CjPglB) can transfer many diverse glycan structures, the acceptor sites that it recognizes are restricted predominantly to those having a negatively charged residue in the −2 position relative to the asparagine. Here, we investigated the acceptor-site preferences for 23 homologs with natural sequence variation compared to CjPglB. Using an ectopic trans-complementation assay for CjPglB function in glycosylation-competent Escherichia coli, we demonstrated in vivo activity for 16 of the candidate OSTs. Interestingly, the OSTs from Campylobacter coli, Campylobacter upsaliensis, Desulfovibrio desulfuricans, Desulfovibrio gigas, and Desulfovibrio vulgaris, exhibited significantly relaxed specificity towards the −2 position compared to CjPglB. These enzymes glycosylated minimal N-X-T motifs in multiple targets and each followed unique, as yet unknown, rules governing acceptor-site preferences. One notable example is D. gigas PglB, which was the only bacterial OST to glycosylate the Fc domain of human immunoglobulin G at its native ‘QYNST’ sequon. Overall, we find that a subset of bacterial OSTs follow their own rules for acceptor-site specificity, thereby expanding the glycoengineering toolbox with previously unavailable biocatalytic diversity.

Protein glycosylation, or the attachment of sugar moieties (glycans) to proteins, is important for protein stability, activity, and immunogenicity. However, understanding the roles and regulations of site-specific glycosylation events remains a significant challenge due to several technological limitations. These limitations include a lack of available tools for biochemical characterization of enzymes involved in glycosylation. A particular challenge is the synthesis of oligosaccharyltransferases (OSTs), which catalyze the attachment of glycans to specific amino acid residues in target proteins. The difficulty arises from the fact that canonical OSTs are large (>70 kDa) and possess multiple transmembrane helices, making them difficult to overexpress in living cells. Here, we address this challenge by establishing a bacterial cell-free protein synthesis platform that enables rapid production of a variety of OSTs in their active conformations. Specifically, by using lipid nanodiscs as cellular membrane mimics, we obtained yields of up to 420 μg/ml for the single-subunit OST enzyme, "Protein glycosylation B" (PglB) from Campylobacter jejuni, as well as for three additional PglB homologs from Campylobacter coli, Campylobacter lari, and Desulfovibrio gigas. Importantly, all of these enzymes catalyzed N-glycosylation reactions in vitro with no purification or processing needed. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability of cell-free synthesized OSTs to glycosylate multiple target proteins with varying N-glycosylation acceptor sequons. We anticipate that this broadly applicable production method will advance glycoengineering efforts by enabling preparative expression of membrane-embedded OSTs from all kingdoms of life.

Novel phthalimide and o-sulfobenzimide-functionalized silsesquioxanes were successfully synthesized via nucleophilic substitution reactions from octakis(3-chloropropyl)octasilsesquioxane. Surprisingly, the formation of deca- and dodecasilsesquioxanes cages was discovered during substitution with phthalimide, but only octasilsesquioxane maintained a cage in the o-sulfobenzimide substitution reaction. Moreover, we report the electronic effect of nitrogen nucleophiles to promote cage-rearrangement of inorganic silsesquioxane core for the first time. Structures of products were confirmed by (1)H, (13)C, and (29)Si NMR spectroscopy, ESI-MS analysis, and single-crystal X-ray diffraction.

Conjugate vaccines are among the most effective methods for preventing bacterial infections, representing a promising strategy to combat drug-resistant pathogens. However, existing manufacturing approaches limit access to conjugate vaccines due to centralized production and cold chain distribution requirements. To address these limitations, we developed a modular technology for in vitro bioconjugate vaccine expression (iVAX) in portable, freeze-dried lysates from detoxified, nonpathogenic Escherichia coli. Upon rehydration, iVAX reactions synthesize clinically relevant doses of bioconjugate vaccines against diverse bacterial pathogens in one hour.We show that iVAX synthesized vaccines against the highly virulent pathogen Franciscella tularensis subsp. tularensis (type A) strain Schu S4 elicited pathogen-specific antibodies in mice at significantly higher levels compared to vaccines produced using engineered bacteria. The iVAX platform promises to accelerate development of new bioconjugate vaccines with increased access through refrigeration-independent distribution and point-of-care production.

A major objective of synthetic glycobiology is to re-engineer existing cellular glycosylation pathways from the top-down or construct non-natural ones from the bottom-up for new and useful purposes. Here, we developed a set of orthogonal pathways for eukaryotic O-linked protein glycosylation in Escherichia coli that installed the cancer-associated mucin-type glycans Tn, T, sialyl-Tn and sialyl-T onto serine residues in acceptor motifs derived from different human Oglycoproteins. These same glycoengineered bacteria were used to supply crude cell extracts enriched with glycosylation machinery that permitted cell-free construction of O-glycoproteins in a one-pot reaction. In addition, O-glycosylation-competent bacteria were able to generate an antigenically authentic Tn-MUC1 glycoform that exhibited reactivity with antibody 5E5, which specifically recognizes cancer-associated glycoforms of MUC1. We anticipate that the orthogonal glycoprotein biosynthesis pathways developed here will provide facile access to structurally diverse O-glycoforms for a range of important scientific and therapeutic applications.

As a common protein modification, asparagine-linked (N-linked) glycosylation has the capacity to greatly influence the biological and biophysical properties of proteins. However, the routine use of glycosylation as a strategy for engineering proteins with advantageous properties is limited by our inability to construct and screen large collections of glycoproteins for cataloguing the consequences of glycan installation. To address this challenge, we describe a combinatorial strategy termed shotgun scanning glycomutagenesis in which DNA libraries encoding all possible glycosylation site variants of a given protein are constructed and subsequently expressed in glycosylation-competent bacteria, thereby enabling rapid determination of glycosylatable sites in the protein. The resulting neoglycoproteins can be readily subjected to available high-throughput assays, making it possible to systematically investigate the structural and functional consequences of glycan conjugation along a protein backbone. The utility of this approach was demonstrated with three different acceptor proteins, namely bacterial immunity protein Im7, bovine pancreatic ribonuclease A, and human anti-HER2 single-chain Fv antibody, all of which were found to tolerate N-glycan attachment at a large number of positions and with relatively high efficiency. The stability and activity of many glycovariants was measurably altered by N-linked glycans in a manner that critically depended on the precise location of the modification. Structural models suggested that affinity was improved by creating novel interfacial contacts with a glycan at the periphery of a protein–protein interface. Importantly, we anticipate that our glycomutagenesis workflow should provide access to unexplored regions of glycoprotein structural space and to custom-made neoglycoproteins with desirable properties.