Bacterial Factories for the Production of Functional Lubricants

The use of bacteria to produce novel materials is a rapidly expanding arena across many sectors of industry. These “bacterial factories” can be engineered to produce a wide variety of moderately valuable materials. This has been demonstrated both in academia and industry, with the production of such resources as biofuels, natural products, and pharmaceuticals. The use of bacterial factories offers several advantages to other means of production, namely that production can occur at the point of use, and can be fed waste products as feedstock, which otherwise would have little to no value. These two factors make bacterial factories an attractive method for production of kilogram scale quantities of various supplies. One such material which serves as a useful foray into this field is the production of mucin-like greases. Mucins are naturally-produced lubricating substances, the structures of which can be altered to produce materials with varying properties, including lubricity, viscosity, and thermal stability. We hypothesize that by intelligently designing mucin-like compounds, and hijacking the biosynthetic pathways of <i>E. coli </i>to produce these proteins, we can construct bacterial factories which produce water-based, ecofriendly lubricants, which can then be compared in terms of performance to traditional, petroleum-based greases. We demonstrate here, the work thus far in the design, transfection, and expression of these proteins, as well as preliminary results of their glycosylation and functionalization towards a functional lubricant.