Directed evolution is an effective strategy to engineer and optimize protein properties, and microbial cell-surface display is a successful method to screen protein libraries. Protein surface display on Bacillus subtilis spores is demonstrated as a tool for screening protein libraries for the first time. Spore display offers advantages over more commonly utilized microbe cell-surface display sy...

The proteins encoded by the spoVA operon, including SpoVAD, are essential for the uptake of the 1:1 chelate of pyridine-2,6-dicarboxylic acid (DPA(2,6)) and Ca(2+) into developing spores of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis. The crystal structure of B. subtilis SpoVAD has been determined recently, and a structural homology search revealed that SpoVAD shares significant structural similarity but n...

This grant supported our work in the detection of pathogenic whole cells. We used a surrogate for bacillus anthracis known as bacillus subtilis and detected is via an acoustic immunoassay. Antibodies for b. subtilis were obtained from Dr. J. Kearny of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and were immobilized onto the surface of a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM). The data from a series of e...

Highly conserved amino acid residues in the C subunits of the germinant receptors (GRs) of spores of Bacillus and Clostridium species have been identified by amino acid sequence comparisons, as well as structural predictions based on the high-resolution structure recently determined for the C subunit of the Bacillus subtilis GerB GR (GerBC). Single and multiple alanine substitutions were made i...