Journal Club: The enzyme bucket brigade

JE Dueber, GC Wu, GR Malmirchegini, TS Moon, CJ Petzold, AV Ullal, KLJ Prather, & JD Keasling. Synthetic protein scaffolds provide modular control over metabolic flux. Nature Biotechnology 27, 753–759 (1 August 2009) | doi:10.1038/nbt.1557

I read and presented this paper in my lab class this past fall -- and I thought it was just one of the coolest papers I'd ever read. Cool concept, rational design, elegant solution to a Hard Problem, multiple benefits, modularity/composability, real-world results... this paper has it all.

You can look at cells as little factories, taking in raw materials and churning out interesting molecules. A cell's naturally occurring assembly lines are optimized by evolution in various ways, to increase efficiency and decrease interference ("cross-talk") with other processes in the cell. In particular, natural metabolic pathways are regulated so that they don't go wildly out of control and start overproducing whatever chemical, because that would be wasteful and expensive (not to mention potentially harmful).

But when you're putting an artificial assembly line into a cell, you have to undo some of these constraints and not others. You have to maximize efficiency, minimize cross-talk, and avoid making toxic products in the middle of the pathway as much as possible. These goals all line up with the goals of the cell. However, your main goal is different from the cell's goal of "produce just enough": you want to produce as much product as possible. More medicine. More biofuel. More super-protein-material-thing. More whatever. So this should be easy, right? The metabolic pathway is made up of enzymes that convert Chemical A to Chemical B to Chemical C, and you're inserting the genes for those enzymes into a bacterium. Why can't you just put very strong promoters in front of those genes, so you get massive quantities of each enzyme, and massive output?

This simple maxing-out approach causes several problems. First of all, it does nothing about the intermediate chemicals along the pathway -- they could still be toxic, or even just float away and go to waste. Second of all, this approach doesn't bother to optimize the ratio of the two enzymes. (If Enzyme 1 is half as efficient as Enzyme 2, then you ought to have twice as much of Enzyme 1.) Third of all, this doesn't do anything to stop the pathway cross-talking with other pathways. Fourth, and possibly most important, there's no guarantee that forcing each individual cell to make as much product as it possibly, possibly can is the most efficient way to convert cell food into useful chemicals. It's probably more efficient to let the cell divert plenty of energy into maintaining its own health and into spawning more cells, so you end up with more product overall.

To solve this dilemma, Dueber et al borrowed a trick that cells often use to regulate their own pathways. A scaffold is a structural protein that grabs on to all the enzymes in a given pathway, and holds them together into something like an assembly line or a bucket brigade.