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- Title
The role of the encapsulated cargo in microcompartment assembly.
- Authors
Mohajerani, Farzaneh; Hagan, Michael F.
- Abstract
Bacterial microcompartments are large, roughly icosahedral shells that assemble around enzymes and reactants involved in certain metabolic pathways in bacteria. Motivated by microcompartment assembly, we use coarse-grained computational and theoretical modeling to study the factors that control the size and morphology of a protein shell assembling around hundreds to thousands of molecules. We perform dynamical simulations of shell assembly in the presence and absence of cargo over a range of interaction strengths, subunit and cargo stoichiometries, and the shell spontaneous curvature. Depending on these parameters, we find that the presence of a cargo can either increase or decrease the size of a shell relative to its intrinsic spontaneous curvature, as seen in recent experiments. These features are controlled by a balance of kinetic and thermodynamic effects, and the shell size is assembly pathway dependent. We discuss implications of these results for synthetic biology efforts to target new enzymes to microcompartment interiors.
- Subjects
CELL compartmentation; ENZYMES; MOLECULAR biology; PROTEINS; BIOTECHNOLOGY
- Publication
PLoS Computational Biology, 2018, Vol 14, Issue 8, p1
- ISSN
1553-734X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006351