Engineering of bacterial outer membrane vesicles for biotechnological applications.

Engineering bacterial outer membrane vesicles enhances their potential as modular, programmable platforms for biotechnological applications.

• Why it matters: OMVs naturally mediate biological communication but face challenges like low yields and heterogeneous cargo, limiting their broader industrial and biomedical use.
• What they did: The review discusses five strategies for inducing hyper-vesiculation and two frameworks for constructing synthetic vesicles, advancing OMV engineering and functional diversification.
• The result: Engineered OMVs enable applications such as high-fidelity membrane protein studies and are poised to impact medicine, environmental remediation, and materials science through future innovations.