Tag Archives: open access

Building modular hemicellulose synthases, now out in Biotechnology for Biofuels

We are happy to announce the publication of our work on modular hemicellulose production in Biotechnology for Biofuels, a leading (open-access!) journal for advancing the biological production of fuels, chemicals, and biomaterials. Here, we describe how enzymes from the cellulose synthase-like superfamily (found throughout the plant kingdom) can be assembled as modular parts (akin to LEGO bricks) to modulate their function and effects on eukaryotic cell growth.

Fig. 1

Reference:

Robert, M., Waldhauer, J., Stritt, F. et al. Modular biosynthesis of plant hemicellulose and its impact on yeast cells. Biotechnol Biofuels 14, 140 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13068-021-01985-z

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. 

Previously the article was available on bioRxiv preprint server: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.20.440611

New publication on wheat mannan

A collaborative study of mannan polysaccharide production in wheat (Triticum aestivum) is now published in the journal Plant Science. Wheat-like polymers that normally accumulate in the developing endosperm of the grain were produced in two heterologous hosts by the expression of a single enzyme, TaCSLA12. Additional mannan-related genes were identified in the wheat endosperm but were not essential for making the polysaccharides in yeast. Moreover, a wheat-like mannan production in a glucomannan-deficient Arabidopsis thaliana triple mutant (csla2 csla3 csla9) did not alter the plant morphology.

Congratulations to our colleagues at INRAE (Nantes, France; who led the study), the Joint BioEnergy Institute (Berkeley, California), Rothamsted Research (UK), and Heinrich Heine University (Düsseldorf, Germany; where our experimental work was conducted).

Read more at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plantsci.2020.110693

Fig. 2 from the study. Subcellular localization of enzymes that may be involved in mannan production. (Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plantsci.2020.110693)

Fig. 3 from the study. Quantification of beta-mannan production in yeast cells after plant enzyme expression. (Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plantsci.2020.110693)