Building 'Nanofactories' to Help Make Medicines and More

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Building 'nanofactories' to help make medicines and more:

Thanks to a lesser-known feature of microbiology, Michigan State University researchers have helped open a door that could lead to medicines, vitamins and more being made at lower costs and with improved efficiency.

The international research team, led by Henning Kirst and Cheryl Kerfeld in the College of Natural Science, have repurposed what are known as bacterial microcompartments and programmed them to produce valuable chemicals from inexpensive starting ingredients.

[...] "The microcompartments, they're like nanoreactors or nanofactories," said Kirst, a senior research associate in Kerfeld's lab, which operates at both MSU and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Kirst, Kerfeld and their teammates saw the microcompartments as an opportunity to take important chemical reactions to the next level. Over the past few decades, researchers have harnessed the power of enzymes found in bacteria to create valuable chemical products including biofuels and medicines.

In those industrial applications, though, chemists often rely on the entire microorganism to produce the desired compound, which Kirst said can lead to complications and inefficiencies.

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