Synthetic biology enables microbes to build muscle
Date:
August 30, 2021
Source:
Washington University in St. Louis
Summary:
Would you wear clothing made of muscle fibers? Use them to tie
your shoes or even wear them as a belt? It may sound a bit odd,
but if those fibers could endure more energy before breaking than
cotton, silk, nylon, or even the material used in bullet-proof
vests, then why not?
FULL STORY ========================================================================== Would you wear clothing made of muscle fibers? Use them to tie your
shoes or even wear them as a belt? It may sound a bit odd, but if those
fibers could endure more energy before breaking than cotton, silk, nylon,
or even the material used in bullet-proof vests, then why not?
========================================================================== Don't worry, this muscle could be produced without harming a single
animal.
Researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University
in St. Louis have developed a synthetic chemistry approach to polymerize proteins inside of engineered microbes. This enabled the microbes to
produce the high molecular weight muscle protein, titin, which was then
spun into fibers.
Their research was published Monday, August 30 in the journal Nature Communications.
Also: "Its production can be cheap and scalable. It may enable many applications that people had previously thought about, but with natural
muscle fibers," said Fuzhong Zhang, professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering. Now, these applications may come
to fruition without the need for actual animal tissues.
The synthetic muscle protein produced in Zhang's lab is titin, one of
the three major protein components of muscle tissue. Critical to its
mechanical properties is the large molecular size of titin. "It's the
largest known protein in nature," said Cameron Sargent, a PhD student
in the Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences and a first author
on the paper along with Christopher Bowen, a recent PhD graduate of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering.
Muscle fibers have been of interest for a long time, Zhang
said. Researchers have been trying to design materials with similar
properties to muscles for various applications, such as in soft
robotics. "We wondered, 'Why don't we just directly make synthetic
muscles?'" he said. "But we're not going to harvest them from animals,
we'll use microbes to do it." To circumvent some of the issues that
typically prevent bacteria from producing large proteins, the research
team engineered bacteria to piece together smaller segments of the protein
into ultra-high molecular weight polymers around two megadaltons in size
-- about 50 times the size of an average bacterial protein.
They then used a wet-spinning process to convert the proteins into fibers
that were around ten microns in diameter, or a tenth the thickness of
human hair.
Working with collaborators Young Shin Jun, professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, and Sinan Keten, professor
in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University,
the group then analyzed the structure of these fibers to identify the
molecular mechanisms that enable their unique combination of exceptional toughness, strength, and damping capacity, or the ability to dissipate mechanical energy as heat.
Aside from fancy clothes or protective armor (again, the fibers are
tougher than the material used in bulletproof vests), Sargent pointed
out that this material has many potential biomedical applications as
well. Because it's nearly identical to the proteins found in muscle
tissue, this synthetic material is presumably biocompatible and could
therefore be a great material for sutures, tissue engineering, and so on.
Zhang's research team doesn't intend to stop with synthetic muscle
fiber. The future will likely hold more unique materials enabled by
their microbial synthesis strategy. Bowen, Cameron, and Zhang have filed
a patent application based on the research.
"The beauty of the system is that it's really a platform that
can be applied anywhere," Sargent said. "We can take proteins
from different natural contexts, then put them into this
platform for polymerization and create larger, longer proteins
for various material applications with a greater sustainability." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
Washington_University_in_St._Louis. Original written by Brandie
Jefferson. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Christopher H. Bowen, Cameron J. Sargent, Ao Wang, Yaguang Zhu,
Xinyuan
Chang, Jingyao Li, Xinyue Mu, Jonathan M. Galazka, Young-Shin Jun,
Sinan Keten, Fuzhong Zhang. Microbial production of megadalton
titin yields fibers with advantageous mechanical properties. Nature
Communications, 2021; 12 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25360-6 ==========================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210830081757.htm
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