Encapsulation of enzymes into protein cage structures holds promise for better understanding enzyme function in cellular environments, by mimicking the crowding and confinement conditions, and for developing new catalytic nanomaterials. However, it has been observed that encapsulation inside protein cages can modulate the activity of an enzyme, which has been attributed to crowding or confinement effects. The research presented here evaluates the encapsulation of enzymes inside the virus-like particle (VLP) derived from bacteriophage P22 using a genetically programmed encapsulation strategy for temporally controlled encapsulation of enzymes inside the P22 VLP <i>in vivo</i>. Results suggests that some enzymes require maturation to their active conformation before encapsulation in order to obtain optimally active enzymes. The strategy and results reported highlight important considerations for the encapsulation of enzymes inside confined reaction environments towards the development of active functional nano-reactors.<br/>

Enzyme folding improves catalytic activity of enzyme cargos in virus-like particle nanoreactors

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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