Bioresources and Bioprocessing

UNLABELLED: Indigo is an economically important dye, especially for the textile industry and the dyeing of denim fabrics for jeans and garments. Around 80,000 tonnes of indigo are chemically produced each year with the use of non-renewable petrochemicals and the use and generation of toxic compounds. As many microorganisms and their enzymes are able to synthesise indigo after the expression of specific oxygenases and hydroxylases, microbial fermentation could offer a more sustainable and environmentally friendly manufacturing platform...

UNLABELLED: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are highly important in biomedicine and hold great potential in clinical treatment for various diseases. In recent years, the capabilities of MSCs have been under extensive investigation for practical application. Regarding therapy, the efficacy usually depends on the amount of MSCs. Nevertheless, the yield of MSCs is still limited due to the traditional cultural methods. Herein, we proposed a three-dimensional (3D) scaffold prepared using poly lactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) nanofiber with polylysine (PLL) grafting, to promote the growth and proliferation of MSCs derived from the human umbilical cord (hUC-MSCs)...

UNLABELLED: Pulse meal should be a valuable product in the animal feed industry based on its strong nutritional and protein profiles. However, it contains anti-nutritional compounds including phenolics (large and small molecular weight), which must be addressed to increase uptake by the industry. Microbial fermentation is currently used as a strategy to decrease larger molecular weight poly-phenolics, but results in the undesirable accumulation of small mono-phenolics. Here, we investigate cell-free biocatalytic reduction of phenolic content in faba bean ( Vicia faba L...

Although celebrating its golden jubilee, rapamycin's importance keeps increasing by the day. Starting as a promising antifungal agent, then as a potent immunosuppressant, strong anticancer drug, and now rapamycin is attracting serious attention as a rejuvenative agent and a possible contributor in treating this era pandemic, COVID-19. Due to its diverse biological activities and promising medical applications, we aimed in this review to put rapamycin under the spot and highlight its discovery, famous microbial producers, reported biological activities, chemical structure, famous analogues, and biosynthesis...

Spent hen are egg-laying hens reaching the end of their laying cycles; billions of spent hens are produced globally each year. Differences in people's attitudes towards spent hen as foods lead to their different fates among countries. While spent hens are consumed as raw or processed meat products in Asian countries such as China, India, Korea, and Thailand, they are treated as a byproduct or waste, not a food product, in the western society; they are instead disposed by burial, incineration, composting (as fertilizers), or rendering into animal feed and pet food, which either create little market value or cause animal welfare and environmental concerns...

Mycoparasites are an assemblage of biotrophic and necrotrophic fungi that occur on plant pathogenic fungal hosts. Biotrophic mycoparasites are often overlooked in transcriptomic-based biocontrol studies. Sphaerodes mycoparasitica ( S.m. ) is a specific biotrophic mycoparasite of plant pathogenic Fusarium graminearum (F.g.) , a devastating Fusarium head blight (FHB) disease in small-grain cereals. To understand the biotrophic mycoparasitism comprehensively, we performed Illumina RNA-Seq transcriptomic study on the fungus-fungus interaction in vitro...

Strain engineering and bioprocessing strategies were applied for biobased production of porphobilinogen (PBG) using Escherichia coli as the cell factory. The non-native Shemin/C4 pathway was first implemented by heterologous expression of hemA from Rhodopseudomonas spheroids to supply carbon flux from the natural tricarboxylic acid (TCA) pathways for PBG biosynthesis via succinyl-CoA. Metabolic strategies were then applied for carbon flux direction from the TCA pathways to the C4 pathway. To promote PBG stability and accumulation, Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats interference (CRISPRi) was applied to repress hemC expression and, therefore, reduce carbon flowthrough toward porphyrin biosynthesis with minimal impact to cell physiology...

The excessive consumption of sugars can cause health issues. Different strategies have been developed to reduce sugars in the diets. However, sugars in fruits and commercial products may be difficult to reduce, limiting their usage among certain populations of people. Zymomonas mobilis is a generally recognized as safe (GRAS) probiotic bacterium with the capability to produce levan-type prebiotics, and thrives in high-sugar environments with unique characteristics to be developed for lignocellulosic biofuel and biochemical production...

Vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding (VARTM), used in manufacturing medium to large-sized composites for transportation industries, requires non-woven mats. While non-woven glass mats used in these applications are optimized for resin impregnation and properties, such optimized mats for natural fibers are not available. In the current research, cattail fibers were extracted from plants (18-30% yield) using alkali retting and non-woven cattail fiber mat was manufactured. The extracted fibers exhibited a normal distribution in diameter ( d avg...

The benefit of microorganisms to humans, animals, insects and plants is increasingly recognized, with intensified microbial endophytes research indicative of this realization. In the agriculture industry, the benefits are tremendous to move towards sustainable crop production and minimize or circumvent the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The research leading to the identification of potential plant endophytes is long and arduous and for many researchers the challenge is ultimately in scale-up production...

The biological pretreatment for the enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomasses depends exclusively on the effective pretreatment process. Herein, we report a significant enhancement of enzymatic saccharification obtained with corn stover using a bacterial strain Bacillus sp. P3. The hemicellulose removal from corn stover by the strain Bacillus sp. P3 was evaluated for enhancing subsequent enzymatic hydrolysis. Therefore, our study revealed that an alkaline-resistant xylanase as well as other enzymes produced by Bacillus sp...

Animal cells are used in the manufacturing of complex biotherapeutic products since the 1980s. From its initial uses in biological research to its current importance in the biopharmaceutical industry, many types of culture media were developed: from serum-based media to serum-free to protein-free chemically defined media. The cultivation of animal cells economically has become the ultimate goal in the field of biomanufacturing. Serum serves as a source of amino acids, lipids, proteins and most importantly growth factors and hormones, which are essential for many cell types...

Glycyrrhetic acid 3- O -mono- β -d-glucuronide (GAMG) as an important derivative of glycyrrhizin (GL) shows stronger biological activities and higher sweetness than GL. The biotransformation process is considered as an efficient strategy for GAMG production, due to its mild reaction, high production efficiency and environmentally friendly status. In this study, licorice straw was used for the first time as a medium for GAMG and lignocellulosic enzyme production via solid-state fermentation (SSF) of endophytic fungus Chaetomium globosum DX-THS3...

The global demand for sustainable energy is increasing due to urbanization, industrialization, population, and developmental growth. Transforming the large quantities of biomass resources such as agro-residues/wastes could raise the energy supply and promote energy mix. Residues of biomass instituted in the rural and industrial centers are enormous, and poor management of these residues results in several indescribable environmental threats. The energy potential of these residues can provide job opportunities and income for nations...

The Global Diabetes Compact was launched by the World Health Organization in April 2021 with one of its important goals to increase the accessibility and affordability of life-saving medicine-insulin. The rising prevalence of diabetes worldwide is bound to escalate the demand for recombinant insulin therapeutics, and currently, the majority of recombinant insulin therapeutics are produced from E. coli inclusion bodies. Here, a comprehensive review of downstream processing of recombinant human insulin/analogue production from E...

Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) systems have become an ideal choice for pathway prototyping, protein production, and biosensing, due to their high controllability, tolerance, stability, and ability to produce proteins in a short time. At present, the widely used CFPS systems are mainly based on Escherichia coli strain. Bacillus subtilis , Corynebacterium glutamate, and Vibrio natriegens are potential chassis cells for many biotechnological applications with their respective characteristics. Therefore, to expand the platform of the CFPS systems and options for protein production, four prokaryotes, E...

Flavone C -arabinosides/xylosides are plant-originated glycoconjugates with various bioactivities. However, the potential utility of these molecules is hindered by their low abundance in nature. Engineering biosynthesis pathway in heterologous bacterial chassis provides a sustainable source of these C -glycosides. We previously reported bifunctional C -glucosyl/ C -arabinosyltransferases in Oryza sativa japonica and O. sativa indica, which influence the C -glycoside spectrum in different rice varieties. In this study, we proved the C -arabinosyl-transferring activity of rice C -glycosyltransferases (CGTs) on the mono- C -glucoside substrate nothofagin, followed by taking advantage of specific CGTs and introducing heterologous UDP-pentose supply, to realize the production of eight different C -arabinosides/xylosides in recombinant E...

Knowledge of the interactions between soil systems, management practices, and climatic extremes are critical for prescription-based sustainable practices that reduce environmental pollution/footprints, disruption of food supply chains, food contamination, and thus improve socio-economic wellbeing. Soil quality status and dynamics under climate change present both a hazard which may not be remedied by simply adding chemicals or improved by crop varieties, and an opportunity (e.g., by indicating impact of a shift in land use) although the specifics remain debatable...

Background: Dye-decolorizing peroxidases (DyPs) are haem-containing peroxidases that show great promises in industrial biocatalysis and lignocellulosic degradation. Through the use of Escherichia coli osmotically-inducible protein Y (OsmY) as a bacterial extracellular protein secretion system (BENNY), we successfully developed a streamlined directed evolution workflow to accelerate the protein engineering of DyP4 from Pleurotus ostreatus strain PC15. Result: After 3 rounds of random mutagenesis with error-prone polymerase chain reaction (epPCR) and 1 round of saturation mutagenesis, we obtained 4D4 variant (I56V, K109R, N227S and N312S) that displays multiple desirable phenotypes, including higher protein yield and secretion, higher specific activity (2...

Enhancing cellulase production in Trichoderma reesei is of great interest for an economical biorefinery. Artificial transcription factors are a potentially powerful molecular strategy for improving cellulase production in T. reesei . In this study, enhanced transcriptional activators XYR1VP, ACE2VP, and ACE1VP were constructed by linking the C terminus of XYR1, ACE2, or ACE1 with an activation domain of herpes simplex virus protein VP16. T. reesei transformants TXYR1VP , TACE2VP , and TACE1VP showed improved cellulase and/or xylanase production...