Engineered yeast provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybees.

Honeybees are important crop pollinators, but they increasingly face pollen starvation as a result of agricultural intensification and climate change. Frequent flowering dearth periods and high-density rearing conditions weaken colonies, which often leads to their demise. Beekeepers provide colonies with pollen substitutes, but these feeds do not sustain brood production because they lack essential sterols found in pollen.

Recombinant production of amaranthin and other betalain variants with yeast cell factories.

Betalains are a class of natural pigments found in plants of the Caryophyllales order. Betanin is the dominant betalain on the food colour market, even though over 80 other variants are known. Recombinant production of betanin has recently gained interest as a cost-efficient and sustainable alternative to traditional plant extraction, but the production of other betalain variants remains largely unexplored.

BAHD acyltransferase from dragon fruit enables production of phyllocactin in engineered yeast.

Microbial fermentation can provide a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to traditional plant extraction to produce natural food colours. Betalains are a class of yellow to red water-soluble pigments. Even though over 80 betalain variants are known, betanin is the only betalain available as a food colourant on the market.

Screening of Plant UDP-Glycosyltransferases for Betanin Production in Yeast.

To cover the rising demand for natural food dyes, new sources and production methods are needed. Microbial fermentation of nature-identical colours, such as the red pigment betanin, has the potential to be a cost-efficient alternative to plant extraction. The last step of betanin production is catalysed by a UDP-glycosyltransferase (UGT).

Deorphanizing solute carriers in for secondary uptake of xenobiotic compounds.

The exchange of small molecules between the cell and the environment happens through transporter proteins. Besides nutrients and native metabolic products, xenobiotic molecules are also transported, however it is not well understood which transporters are involved. In this study, by combining exo-metabolome screening in yeast with transporter characterization in oocytes, we mapped the activity of 30 yeast transporters toward six small non-toxic substrates.

Combinatorial engineering of betalain biosynthesis pathway in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Background: Betalains, comprising red-violet betacyanins and yellow-orange betaxanthins, are the hydrophilic vacuolar pigments that provide bright coloration to roots, fruits, and flowers of plants of the Caryophyllales order. Betanin extracted from red beets is permitted quantum satis as a natural red food colorant (E162). Due to antioxidant activity, betanin has potential health benefits.

Engineering Saccharomyces cerevisiae for the de novo Production of Halogenated Tryptophan and Tryptamine Derivatives.

The indole scaffold is a recurring structure in multiple bioactive heterocycles and natural products. Substituted indoles like the amino acid tryptophan serve as a precursor for a wide range of natural products with pharmaceutical or agrochemical applications. Inspired by the versatility of these compounds, medicinal chemists have for decades exploited indole as a core structure in the drug discovery process.

Production of abscisic acid in the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica.

Abscisic acid (ABA) is a phytohormone with applications in agriculture and human health. ABA can be produced by Botrytis cinerea, a plant pathogenic filamentous fungus. However, the cultivation process is lengthy and strain improvement by genetic engineering is difficult.

Engineering of CYP76AH15 can improve activity and specificity towards forskolin biosynthesis in yeast.

Background: Forskolin is a high-value diterpenoid produced exclusively by the Lamiaceae plant Coleus forskohlii. Today forskolin is used pharmaceutically for its adenyl-cyclase activating properties. The limited availability of pure  forskolin is currently hindering its full utilization, thus a new environmentally friendly, scalable and sustainable strategy is needed for forskolin production.

Fragment-based discovery and optimization of BACE1 inhibitors.

A novel series of 2-aminobenzimidazole inhibitors of BACE1 has been discovered using fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) techniques. The rapid optimization of these inhibitors using structure-guided medicinal chemistry is discussed.

An in silico method for predicting Ames activities of primary aromatic amines by calculating the stabilities of nitrenium ions.

In this paper, we describe an in silico first principal approach to predict the mutagenic potential of primary aromatic amines. This approach is based on the so-called "nitrenium hypothesis", which was developed by Ford et al. in the early 1990s.

Involvement of water in carbohydrate-protein binding: concanavalin A revisited.

Ordered water molecules bound to protein surfaces, or in protein-ligand interfaces, are frequently observed by crystallography. The investigation of the impact of such conserved water molecules on protein stability and ligand affinity requires detailed structural, dynamic, and thermodynamic analyses. Several crystal structures of the legume lectin concanavalin A (Con A) bound to closely related carbohydrate ligands show the presence of a conserved water molecule that mediates ligand binding.

QSPR models for various physical properties of carbohydrates based on molecular mechanics and quantum chemical calculations.

Quantitative Structure-Property Relationships (QSPR) have been developed for a series of monosaccharides, including the physical properties of partial molar heat capacity, heat of solution, melting point, heat of fusion, glass-transition temperature, and solid state density. The models were based on molecular descriptors obtained from molecular mechanics and quantum chemical calculations, combined with other types of descriptors. Saccharides exhibit a large degree of conformational flexibility, therefore a methodology for selecting the energetically most favorable conformers has been developed, and was used for the development of the QSPR models.

Recent trends in carbohydrate modeling.

The exploding activities in modeling of carbohydrates during the past few years is reviewed with emphasis on advances in improving force fields, coupling of NMR measurements with molecular dynamics simulations, direct calculation of thermodynamic properties, application of quantum chemical methods on a large scale, and web-access to modeling.