Encapsulin Nanocompartments for Biomanufacturing Applications

Abstract

Enzyme scaffolding is an emerging technique for enhancing yield and efficiency of biomanufacturing processes for generating high-value products. Of the many scaffolds available for in vivo and cell-free applications, encapsulin protein nanocompartments have garnered recent attention due to their desirable properties as a scaffold, such as robust self-assembly, high thermal stability, and the inherent ability to package and display enzymatic cargo. In this chapter, we discuss basic and advanced methods for encapsulin engineering, as well as the many encapsulin-based biomanufacturing systems that have been built. We subsequently discuss how these advances can be applied to increasingly complex encapsulin systems and look to the future of biomanufacturing in tunable protein nanocompartments.