Rewiring Gram-Negative Bacteria Cell Surfaces with Bio-Orthogonal Chemistry via Liposome Fusion.

The ability to tailor bacteria cell surfaces with non-native molecules is critical to advance the study of bacteria communication, cell behavior, and for next-generation therapeutics to improve livestock and human health. Such modifications would allow for novel control over cell behavior, cell-cell interactions, biofilm formation, adjuvant conjugation, and imaging. Current methods to engineer bacteria surfaces have made major advances but rely on complicated, slow, and often expensive molecular biology and metabolic manipulation methods with limited scope on the type of molecules installed onto the surface. In this report, we introduce a new straightforward method based on liposome fusion to engineer Gram-negative bacteria cells with bio-orthogonal groups that can subsequently be conjugated to a range of molecules (biomolecules, small molecules, probes, proteins, nucleic acids, ligands, and radiolabels) for further studies and programmed behavior of bacteria. This method is fast, efficient, inexpensive, and useful for installing a broad scope of ligands and biomolecules to Gram-negative bacteria surfaces.