Structure-guided engineering of oligosaccharyltransferase PglB and acceptor proteins for production of novel conjugate vaccines in Escherichia coli

• Research unit: INNOSUISSE
• Project number: 13050.1;7 PFLS-LS

Short description (English)

Structure-guided engineering of oligosaccharyltransferase PglB and acceptor proteins for production of novel conjugate vaccines in Escherichia coli

Abstract (English)

In vivo production of glycosylated proteins in Escherichia coli holds great promise for the cost-efficient production of conjugate vaccines. However, transfer efficiency of oligosaccharyltransferase PglB for many medically relevant polysaccharide antigens is low. In this project state-of-the-art methods for directed evolution of enzymes will be combined with in silico glycan docking in order to engineer PglB variants which accept three difficult-to transfer glycan structures as substrates. In addition an alternative, highly immunogenic carrier protein containing optimized glycosylation sites will be developed, also guided by protein modeling. The project will enable in vivo production of novel conjugate vaccine candidates against three important bacterial pathogens.