Bacterial membrane vesicles as a biomedical engineering platform

Bacterial cells release membrane vesicles from their cell envelope.

These vesicles are have a range of properties making them desirable for applications in biomedical engineering for example as drug delivery vehicles or vaccines.

However, the development is hampered by the lack of knowledge relating to vesicle formation, composition, physicochemical properties, and how these factors in turn influence biological function.This four-year project aims to break new ground in the fundamental understanding of how chemical composition of bacterial vesicles is influenced by environmental and bacteria-specific triggers.

Furthermore, we will investigate how these affect physicochemical properties and how similar the processes are between bacterial species. We will isolate vesicles from a range of bacteria under different conditions.

We will characterize them in detail using complementary analytical techniques including spectroscopy, microscopy, lipidomics, proteomics, metabolomics and multivariate analysis.

The data form the base for an in-depth understanding of how physicochemical properties of membrane vesicles are linked to composition during a range of conditions.The knowledge built in the project will form a solid foundation onto which the scientific community can build when tailoring bacterial vesicles for specific applications, thereby, providing new tools for the area of biomedical engineering.