Professor
Kuroda Kouichi
Division of Applied Life Sciences, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University, Japan
Title of the talk: Yeast Cell Surface Engineering for Molecular Design of Biocatalyst and Protein Engineering
Abstract
Yeast cell surface engineering is a promising strategy for molecular breeding of novel functional cells and protein/peptide engineering. In this system, functional heterologous proteins/peptides are genetically displayed on the yeast cell surface by fusion with a part of cell wall- or cell membrane-anchoring proteins. Cell surface display system has advantages compared to conventional expression manners such as intracellular expression and extracellular secretion. Especially, the displayed proteins/peptides can interact with environmental substances with a molecular mass that cannot be imported into a cell. In addition, multiple kinds of proteins/peptides can be simultaneously displayed on the same cell surface, leading to the promoted synergistic reaction between the different kinds of enzymes (proximity effect). Meanwhile, the proteins/peptides displayed on the cell surface can be directly analyzed using intact cells after cultivation without troublesome protein purification and concentration procedures. Thus, it is possible to treat the cells displaying proteins/peptides as protein/peptide-covered microparticles.
Our constructed yeasts by cell surface engineering have been named “arming yeast”, and successfully led to a wide range of applications such as biocatalyst, bioremediation, synthesis of valuable chemicals, biosensor, live vaccine, and recovery of rare metal ions. The cell surface display system is also useful as a biological tool for protein/peptide engineering via high-throughput screening of protein/peptide libraries with combinatorial mutations. Therefore, this technology has been also developed in various bacteria as well as eukaryotic cells. Here, the advances of molecular design of novel biocatalyst and protein/peptide engineering by cell surface engineering are summarized.
Biography
Associate Prof. Kouichi Kuroda received PhD in Engineering from Kyoto Unversity, Japan. He worked as a school-affairs assistance member (from Apr 2004 to Apr 2006) and an Assistant Professor (from May 2006 to Dec 2008) at Kyoto University. Since Jan 2009, he is Associate Professor at Division of Applied Life Sciences, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University. In the meanwhile, he was a Visiting Scientist at Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MA, USA (from July 2014 to March 2015). He has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals and served as an editorial board member of Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology (from Jan 2013 to Dec 2014).
Publications: Researchgate