Controlled E. coli aggregation mediated by DNA and XNA hybridization.

Summary Chemical cell surface modification is a fast-growing field of research, due to a common interest of chemists and synthetic biologists in tissue engineering, cell-based immunotherapy, and regenerative medicine. Few works, however, have been realized with bacteria, to engineer in this way the formation of bacterial tissues. We present here, an orthogonal nucleic acid-protein conjugation strategy to promote artificial bacterial aggregation. This system gathers the high selectivity and stability of linkage to a protein Tag expressed at the cell surface and the modularity and reversibility of aggregation due to oligonucleotide hybridization. For the first time, XNA (xeno nucleic acids in the form of 1,5-anhydrohexitol nucleic acids) were immobilized at cell surface to induce bacterial aggregation.