The project is coordinated by Steffen Lindner at Charité and includes my group at @unileiden.bsky.social as well as six other European partners.
Looking forward to working together with this great interdisciplinary team!
I am happy to share that a joint EIC Pathfinder Open project has been funded. The CarboNcare consortium will develop disruptive technology for the sustainable production of chemicals from methanol.
cordis.europa.eu/project/id/1...
Please share: I am hiring a postdoc that will work on enzyme characterization and engineering in the frame of a recently granted EU consortium project.
Read all details here and apply until February 5: careers.universiteitleiden.nl/job/Postdoct...
Our team met at Córdoba to kick off our @horizoneu.bsky.social project last month! 🇪🇺
“It was a fantastic opportunity for everyone to dive into the plans for metabolic engineering of cyanobacteria.”
Partners sharer their experience and roles in the C5 project.
Thank you for hosting us @uco.es!
Thanks for hosting us, Maria Agustina Dominguez-Martin and Henning Kirst! I look forward to the exciting science that is ahead of us.
Last week, I attended the kick-off meeting for our EU-funded C5 project in Cordoba, Spain. It was great to discuss our plans for the metabolic engineering of Cyanobacteria in detail with all partners, and I really enjoyed the visit to sunny Andalusia.
Top: (Top row) Sensitivity of S. coelicolor mutants to GlcNAc. Spores (5 × 105 CFU) of S. coelicolor M145 and its mutant derivatives ∆nagB, SMA11, ∆nagB∆nagS, ∆nagB∆nagSC (∆nagB∆nagS expressing nagS) and ∆nagB∆nagSE (∆nagB∆nagS with empty plasmid pSET152) were streaked on MM agar plates with 1% mannitol (Mann) and 1% mannitol plus 10 mM GlcNAc (GlcNAc). (Bottom row) NagS and its role in GlcNAc sensing. Spores of M145 and ∆nagS were plated on MM and R5 with 0, 0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 150, and 200 mM GlcNAc. Note that nagS mutants hardly respond to GlcNAc. Bottom: Model for the metabolic control of development by GlcNAc and NagS. During late vegetative growth of streptomycetes, the old vegetative or substrate hyphae are degraded in a process of programmed cell death (PCD), to produce the nutrients required to build the aerial mycelium (see mycelial drawings on the right). Mycelial lysis results in breakdown of the cell-wall, leading to the accumulation of GlcNAc-6P, which is a major nutritional signal for the onset of development and antibiotic production. NagS converts GlcNAc-6P into 6P-chromogen I (denoted as X-Ac-6P), which in turn is deacetylated by NagA into a toxic metabolite (denoted as X-6P) that resembles ribose. The toxic metabolite promotes cell lysis, thus releasing more GlcNAc-6P that serves as substrate for NagS and NagA. A salvage pathway then switches off the toxic pathway again. For this, GlcNAc-6P is converted by NagA and NagB into Fructose-6P (Fru-6P), which enters the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP), thereby producing 6-phosphogluconate (6-PG), a metabolic inhibitor of NagS. Thus, production of toxic metabolites ceases and the transition to aerial growth can be initiated. Arrows with round ends represent inhibition, dashed arrow shows proposed activity.
GlcNAc build-up acts as a key metabolic signal in #Streptomyces, but how does it triggers developmental responses? @gillesvanwezel.bsky.social &co show that the enzyme NagS dehydrates GlcNAc-6P into a reactive intermediate, triggering a toxicity-based checkpoint @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/44pE08I
Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting our work at the first CO2FIX conference in Tianjin, China. It was great to see how seriously this research area is taken in China and how breakthroughs in research are rapidly moving towards large-scale applications in biotechnology.
Please share: I am hiring a postdoc that will work on enzyme characterization and engineering in the frame of the EU consortium project C5.
Read all details here and apply until August 10: www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies...
Great collaboration with @lennartschada.bsky.social on an #enzyme converting the #plastic component ethylene glycol and to a feedstock chemical for microbes. Offering new ways to use plastic biotechnologically. 🧪
Ecogenomics and functional biogeography of the Roseobacter group in the global oceans based on 653 MAGs and SAGs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs 🌊
This work was largely carried out by Minrui Ren in my group at @unileiden.bsky.social and supported by collaborations with Timo Glatter and @rebeleinlab.bsky.social at @mpimicrobiomarburg.bsky.social and @synmikro.bsky.social as well as Meindert Lamers at LUMC and NeCEN.
This study paves the way towards applications of these enzymes in biocatalysis and metabolic engineering for sustainable production with PET-derived ethylene glycol as feedstock.
We also show that the transcriptional activator EtgR controls expression of the gene cluster. Bioinformatic analysis reveals that the etg gene cluster is widely distributed among bacteria, suggesting a common role of NAD-dependent dehydrogenases in ethylene glycol assimilation.
Using proteomics, we identify a gene cluster that is strongly expressed in the presence of ethylene glycol. We report the functional and structural characterization of EtgB and EtgA, key enzymes encoded by this etg gene cluster.
Ethylene glycol is widely used as monomer of the plastic PET. It is therefore highly relevant as sustainable feedstock for microbial biotechnology. In our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we characterize efficient enzymes for ethylene glycol oxidation: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The project is coordinated by @tinadominguez.bsky.social and Henning Kirst at @uco.es and includes my group at @unileiden.bsky.social as well as the teams of Steffen Lindner at Charité, Maria Barbosa at @w-u-r.bsky.social, and Laura Martinelli at INsociety.
Looking forward to working together!
I am happy to share that a joint EIC Pathfinder Challenges project has been funded. The C5 consortium will develop disruptive technology for the sustainable production of isoprene from carbon dioxide.
Stay tuned for more updates and open positions.
cordis.europa.eu/project/id/1...
1/3 Although the issue of releasing GMOs for env bioremediation has been virtually absent of the mainstream scientific literature in Europe/US for >20 yrs, the topic has continued strong in Asia—alas in less fancy/visible journals. Time to revisit the subject in view of new global challenges 💪🏻!
This strain can degrade five recalcitrant pollutants simultaneously and was successfully tested with real-life industrial wastewater!
The study is nicely summarized in an article appearing in @chemistryworld.com, to which I contributed some comments: www.chemistryworld.com/news/enginee...
Genetically enhanced bacteria can potentially become an effective tool for bioremediation in the future. Recently, an exciting breakthrough study about an engineered strain of the marine bacterium Vibrio natriegens was published in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@dirktischler.bsky.social is opening the @vaam-microbes.bsky.social conference 2025 at @ruhr-uni-bochum.de. Looking forward to three days of presentations, posters, and networking!
Only one week left to apply for this exciting PhD position, supervised by @gillesvanwezel.bsky.social and me!
Please apply if you are interested in microbial biochemistry and have a solid background in enzymes, metabolic pathways, and bacterial genetics.
www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies...
Ridgeline chart showing the distribution of global daily air temperature differences from the pre-industrial reference period (1850-1900), for every year between 1940 and 2024. Each individual year resembles a hill, shaded in a darker shade of red and further to the right for warmer years. The trend is clearly towards warmer years, with 2024 standing out as first year above 1.5C.
NEW: 2024 has just been confirmed as the warmest year on record, and the first to breach the 1.5C threshold.
We used a ridgeline (Joy Division inspired) chart to visualise daily temperature anomalies since 1940.
2024 clearly stands out with 100% of its days above 1.3C and 75% above 1.5C.
Here's the Chancellor candidate of the German Greens, Robert Habeck, stating what everyone needs to know. Namely that a strong EU is the best counterweight to authoritarians like Musk and Trump. Which is why they support those parties that want to weaken the EU.
[with English subtitles]
Synbio across environmental scales! By @ricardsole.bsky.social et al. doi.org/10.1021/acss...
Not all Bradyrhizobium fix N2! In fact, most that live in soil probably don’t. We isolated a bunch from Arizona soils and found none had N-fixing or nodulation genes. We report their genomes and phylogeny here in an accepted paper at access microbiology! www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
A screenshot of a paper on bioarxiv illustrating the lack of blue sky share button!
Would you like to see @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social add a share to blue sky button?! I know I would! Share this post to let @richardsever.bsky.social @erictopol.bsky.social and others at bioarxiv know!
Which one are you?
Among scientists are collectors, classifiers, and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
–Peter Medawar
The denitrification ability and #nitrogen metabolism pathway of aerobic #denitrifier Marinobacter alkaliphilus SBY-1 under low C/N ratios doi.org/10.1016/j.sc...
