{"doi":"10.1002/anie.202305178","title":"Secretion‐Catalyzed Assembly of Protein Biomaterials on a Bacterial Membrane Surface","abstract":"Protein-based biomaterials have played a key role in tissue engineering, and additional exciting applications as self-healing materials and sustainable polymers are emerging. Over the past few decades, recombinant expression and production of various fibrous proteins from microbes have been demonstrated; however, the resulting proteins typically must then be purified and processed by humans to form usable fibers and materials. Here, we show that the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis can be programmed to secrete silk through its translocon via an orthogonal signal peptide/peptidase pair. Surprisingly, we discover that this translocation mechanism drives the silk proteins to assemble into fibers spontaneously on the cell surface, in a process we call secretion-catalyzed assembly (SCA). Secreted silk fibers form self-healing hydrogels with minimal processing. Alternatively, the fibers retained on the membrane provide a facile route to create engineered living materials from Bacillus cells. This work provides a blueprint to achieve autonomous assembly of protein biomaterials in useful morphologies directly from microbial factories.","journal":"Angewandte Chemie International Edition","year":2023,"id":359615,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.957,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1110562,"name":"Sea On Lee","orcid":"0000-0001-6462-8751","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1110563,"name":"Nitya Vissamsetti","orcid":"0000-0003-2771-3193","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":896450,"name":"Si‐Kao Guo","orcid":"0000-0002-7680-8060","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":326921,"name":"Margaret E. Johnson","orcid":"0000-0001-9881-291X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":314023,"name":"Stephen D. Fried","orcid":"0000-0003-2494-2193","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1110561,"name":"Qi Xie","orcid":"0000-0002-3591-8749","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":76,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:13:57.361401Z","pmid":"37469298","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}