Engineering bacteria for biogenic synthesis of chalcogenide nanomaterials

Abstract

SummaryMicrobes naturally build nanoscale structures, including structures assembled from inorganic materials. Here we combine the natural capabilities of microbes with engineered genetic control circuits to demonstrate the ability to control biological synthesis of chalcogenide nanomaterials in a heterologous host. We transferred reductase genes from both Shewanella sp. ANA-3 and Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium into an heterologous host (Escherichia coli) and examined the mechanisms that regulate the properties of biogenic nanomaterials. Expression of arsenic reductase genes and thiosulfate reductase genes in E. coli resulted in the synthesis of arsenic sulfide nanomaterials. In addition to processing the starting materials via redox enzymes, cellular components also nucleated the formation of arsenic sulfide nanomaterials. The shape of the nanomaterial was influenced by the bacterial culture, with the synthetic E. coli strain producing nanospheres and conditioned media or cultures of wild type Shewanella sp. producing . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/266502 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Feb. 15, 2018; 2 nanofibers. The diameter of these nanofibers also depended on the biological context of synthesis. These results demonstrate the potential for biogenic synthesis of nanomaterials with controlled properties by combining the natural capabilities of wild microbes with the tools from synthetic biology.

Living electronics: A catalogue of engineered living electronic components

“…Biomineralizing microbes can produce inorganic materials that can act as wires or as more advanced electronic components such as photoresistors and transistors. Biogenic formation of inorganic nanomaterials can: (1) enable the synthesis of technologically relevant materials at ambient temperature, pressure and near neutral pH, without the resource‐intensive conditions required for conventional chemical or solid‐state material fabrication (Estroff, 2008); (2) allow use of synthetic biology tools to control material morphology and chemical composition (Chellamuthu, Naughton, et al, 2019; Chellamuthu, Tran, et al, 2019) and (3) allow the formation of cell‐nanomaterial hybrids that combine the properties of both microbes and solid‐state material (Ng et al, 2019).…”