Figure 1

Biosynthetic potential of Microbial Cell Factories in Nanosciences. Bacteria and other microbes are good producers of particulate entities with values in Nanotechnology in general and in Nanomedicine in particular. From top left, clockwise: First, cells themselves and their infecting viruses are used for peptide display (cell surface display or phage display technologies, respectively). Among other applications including selecting ligands for receptor mediated drug delivery, biosensing or imaging [27–31], peptide display show important promises in molecular biomimetics, to generate molecular links between synthetic and biological components of hybrid materials [32, 33]. Also, animal, plant and bacterial viruses, being manageable at the nanoscale, are used as scaffolds for nanofabrication of electronic components [34] and as building blocks for functionalized surfaces [35, 36], apart from their more conventional application as vehicles for the delivery of nucleic acids in gene therapy [37, 38]. Interestingly, viral components as the DNA-packaging motor of phi29 bacteriophage [39] have been explored as vehicles in drug delivery. VLPs, produced in both eukaryotic microbes and in bacteria, apart from their conventional application in vaccination show promising potential as nano-containers for drug delivery[40]. Other protein self assembling complexes produced in bacteria such as flagella, explored to generate nanomotors or as templates for nanofabrication [41–43], or inclusion bodies, used as soft-matter scaffolds in tissue engineering [44–46] or as functional materials [47] are under deep exploration and further development. Magnetosomes from magnetotactic bacterial have shown exciting potentials in drug delivery, imaging and tissue engineering [48–53], while a diversity of metal nanoparticles produced in bacteria, whose properties can be tuned during production, are in use or under development for nano-electronics, therapy and imaging [54–60]. Main microbial polymers including polysaccharides, polyesters and polyamides can be nanostructured upon isolation from producing cells for uses in material sciences, while others, such as gellan, dextran, PHA and HA, are naturally produced as nanoparticulate materials [61–65], than can be further functionalized in vivo by the genetic engineering of producing cells [66, 67].