Optimization of microbial cell factories for astaxanthin production: Biosynthesis and regulations, engineering strategies and fermentation optimization strategies
June 2022
The global market demand for natural astaxanthin is rapidly increasing owing to its safety, the potential health benefits, and the diverse applications in food and pharmaceutical industries. The major...
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Synthetic polycistronic sequences in eukaryotes
December 2021
The need for co-ordinate, high-level, and stable expression of multiple genes is essential for the engineering of biosynthetic circuits and metabolic pathways. This work outlines the functionality and...
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Degradation strategies of pesticide residue: From chemicals to synthetic biology
June 2023
The past 50 years have witnessed a massive expansion in the demand and application of pesticides. However, pesticides are difficult to be completely degraded without intervention hence the pesticide...
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Glycosyltransferases: Mining, engineering and applications in biosynthesis of glycosylated plant natural products
March 2022
UDP-Glycosyltransferases (UGTs) catalyze the transfer of nucleotide-activated sugars to specific acceptors, among which the GT1 family enzymes are well-known for their function in biosynthesis of natural...
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Biotechnological and food synthetic biology potential of platform strain: Bacillus licheniformis
June 2023
Bacillus licheniformis is one of the most characteristic Gram-positive bacteria. Its unique genetic background and safety characteristics make it have important biologic applications in the food industry,...
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Production of anthocyanins in metabolically engineered microorganisms: Current status and perspectives
December 2017
Microbial production of plant-derived natural products by engineered microorganisms has achieved great success thanks to large extend to metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. Anthocyanins, the...
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Melatonin biosynthesis pathways in nature and its production in engineered microorganisms
March 2022
Melatonin is a biogenic amine that can be found in plants, animals and microorganism. The metabolic pathway of melatonin is different in various organisms, and biosynthetic endogenous melatonin acts...
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Development of synthetic biology tools to engineer Pichia pastoris as a chassis for the production of natural products
June 2021
The methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris (a.k.a. Komagataella phaffii) is one of the most commonly used hosts for industrial production of recombinant proteins. As a non-conventional yeast, P. pastoris...
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Complex peptide natural products: Biosynthetic principles, challenges and opportunities for pathway engineering
March 2022
Complex peptide natural products exhibit diverse biological functions and a wide range of physico-chemical properties. As a result, many peptides have entered the clinics for various applications. Two...
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Engineering and characterization of dehalogenase enzymes from Delftia acidovorans in bioremediation of perfluorinated compounds
June 2022
Per- and Polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) are a broad class of synthetic compounds that have fluorine substituted for hydrogen in several or all locations and are globally categorized as PFCs...
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Advances in engineered Bacillus subtilis biofilms and spores, and their applications in bioremediation, biocatalysis, and biomaterials
September 2021
Bacillus subtilis is a commonly used commercial specie with broad applications in the fields of bioengineering and biotechnology. B. subtilis is capable of producing both biofilms and spores. Biofilms...
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Mechanisms and biotechnological applications of transcription factors
December 2023
Transcription factors play an indispensable role in maintaining cellular viability and finely regulating complex internal metabolic networks. These crucial bioactive functions rely on their ability...
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A novel CRISPR/Cas9 system with high genomic editing efficiency and recyclable auxotrophic selective marker for multiple-step metabolic rewriting in Pichia pastoris
September 2023
The methylotrophic budding yeast Pichia pastoris has been utilized to the production of a variety of heterologous recombinant proteins owing to the strong inducible alcohol oxidase promoter (pAOX1)....
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Targeted genome mining for microbial antitumor agents acting through DNA intercalation
September 2023
Microbial natural products have been one of the most important sources for drug development. In the current postgenomic era, sequence-driven approaches for natural product discovery are becoming increasingly...
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Methodologies for preparation of prokaryotic extracts for cell-free expression systems
December 2020
Cell-free systems that mimic essential cell functions, such as gene expression, have dramatically expanded in recent years, both in terms of applications and widespread adoption. Here we provide a review...
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An improved CRISPRi system in Pichia pastoris
September 2023
CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) has been developed and widely used for gene repression in various hosts. Here we report an improved CRISPRi system in Pichia pastoris by fusing dCas9 with endogenous transcriptional...
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Microbial synthesis of bacitracin: Recent progress, challenges, and prospects
June 2023
Microorganisms are important sources of various natural products that have been commercialized for human medicine and animal healthcare. Bacitracin is an important antibacterial natural product predominantly...
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CRISPR-Cas9/Cas12a biotechnology and application in bacteria
September 2018
CRISPR-Cas technologies have greatly reshaped the biology field. In this review, we discuss the CRISPR-Cas with a particular focus on the associated technologies and applications of CRISPR-Cas9 and...
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Chemical modifications of proteins and their applications in metalloenzyme studies
March 2021
Protein chemical modifications are important tools for elucidating chemical and biological functions of proteins. Several strategies have been developed to implement these modifications, including enzymatic...
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Artificial multi-enzyme cascades and whole-cell transformation for bioconversion of C1 compounds: Advances, challenge and perspectives
December 2023
Artificial multi-enzyme cascades bear great potential for bioconversion of C1 compounds to value-added chemicals. Over the past decade, massive efforts have been devoted to constructing multi-enzyme...
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Recent advances on N-acetylneuraminic acid: Physiological roles, applications, and biosynthesis
September 2023
N-Acetylneuraminic acid (Neu5Ac), the most common type of Sia, generally acts as the terminal sugar in cell surface glycans, glycoconjugates, oligosaccharides, lipo-oligosaccharides, and polysaccharides,...
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Pathway engineering strategies for improved product yield in yeast-based industrial ethanol production
March 2022
Product yield on carbohydrate feedstocks is a key performance indicator for industrial ethanol production with the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This paper reviews pathway engineering strategies for...
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Metabolic engineering of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens for efficient production of α-glucosidase inhibitor1-deoxynojirimycin
September 2023
Owing to the feature of strong α-glucosidase inhibitory activity, 1-deoxynojirimycin (1-DNJ) has broad application prospects in areas of functional food, biomedicine, etc., and this research wants to...
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Construction and application of high-quality genome-scale metabolic model of Zymomonas mobilis to guide rational design of microbial cell factories
September 2023
High-quality genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) could play critical roles on rational design of microbial cell factories in the classical Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle of synthetic biology studies....
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Methanol-based biomanufacturing of fuels and chemicals using native and synthetic methylotrophs
September 2023
Methanol has recently gained significant attention as a potential carbon substrate for the production of fuels and chemicals, owing to its high degree of reduction, abundance, and low price. Native...
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