Engineering a Plant Viral Coat Protein for Hybrid Self-Assembly of CO-Capturing Catalytic Nanofilaments

Plant virus-based nanoparticles are used as self-assembled protein scaffolds for the construction of enzyme nanocarriers. To date, one-pot production and coupling of both enzymes and scaffolds by genetic conjugation have been demonstrated only in plants. Herein, we report bacterial production and self-assembly of nanofilaments for CO capture. Filamentous virus-like particles (VLPs) were successfully formed by genetically fusing carbonic anhydrase from (CA) to the N terminus of the coat protein (CP) of potato virus Y with a flexible linker. The instability of VLPs against proteolytic degradation was circumvented by the periplasmic export of the fusion protein. The truncated form of CP coexpressed by internal translation was crucial for the successful formation of long filamentous VLPs by alleviating steric hindrance hybrid assembly. The fast and economic bottom-up fabrication of highly active nanobiocatalyst allows the nanofilaments to be efficiently used and recovered in potential biocatalytic and biosensor systems.