Engineering bacterial membrane vesicles for application

Abstract

Bacterial membrane vesicles (BMVs) are nanoscale vesicular structures produced by prokaryotic bacteria during their growth. The diameter of BMVs varies between 20 and 400 nm. BMVs can incorporate bacterial proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids. On the one hand, BMVs can effectively stimulate host immune response to set up immune protection ability. On the other hand, BMVs are biosafe candidates for vaccine development, drug delivery, and cancer therapy owing to the lack of self-replication ability. However, wild-type bacteria have poor BMV yields, and BMVs from the wild-type bacterial strains may be unsafe due to the carriage of bacterial toxins, such as lipopolysaccharides, hemolysins, and harmful proteins. In this review, we summarize the engineering modification of BMV-producing bacteria as well as BMVs themselves to attenuate BMVs toxicity, enhance vesicle immunogenicity, and increase BMVs production. The engineered BMVs show broad applications in Biomedicine.

Keywords

• bacterial membrane vesicles
• genetic engineering
• vaccine development
• drug delivery
• cancer treatment