Publications by authors named "E J Skoog"

Article Synopsis
  • The yeast Komagataella phaffii is favored by biotech startups for producing recombinant proteins due to its safety record and effective production processes, but recent findings reveal a significant polysaccharide accumulation during fermentation that complicates product purity and adds processing costs.
  • The study focused on using K. phaffii strain YB-4290 to produce lactoferrin, uncovering that a considerable amount of carbohydrate (mainly composed of mannose) co-purifies with the protein, indicating challenges in purification methods.
  • Further investigations into carbohydrate sources showed that commonly used strains produce baseline exopolysaccharides, with higher levels occurring under recombinant protein expression, which may inform strategies for improving efficiency in protein production with K. ph
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Bovine lactoferrin (bLf) confers significant functional benefits for human health, but low concentrations in milk and high cost of commercial production limit availability and thus product application. Precision fermentation offers a solution to increase availability of biosimilar recombinant bLf (rbLf) thereby opening new opportunities for this high-value ingredient. To comply with regulatory requirements, we aimed to establish that rbLf from is substantially similar to native bLf in structure and key functions.

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Pustular mats from Shark Bay, Western Australia, host complex microbial communities bound within an organic matrix. These mats harbour many poorly characterized organisms with low relative abundances (<1%), such as candidate phyla Hydrogenedentota and Sumerlaeota. Here, we aim to constrain the metabolism and physiology of these candidate phyla by analyzing two representative metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from a pustular mat.

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Pustular microbial mats in Shark Bay, Western Australia, are modern analogs of microbial systems that colonized peritidal environments before the evolution of complex life. To understand how these microbial communities evolved to grow and metabolize in the presence of various environmental stresses, the horizontal gene transfer (HGT) detection tool, MetaCHIP, was used to identify the horizontal transfer of genes related to stress response in 83 metagenome-assembled genomes from a Shark Bay pustular mat. Subsequently, maximum-likelihood phylogenies were constructed using these genes and their most closely related homologs from other environments in order to determine the likelihood of these HGT events occurring within the pustular mat.

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Background: Current diagnostics for patients with lingering symptoms categorized as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS) have their limitations and may be difficult to interpret. The aim of this exploratory study was to evaluate the feasibility of protein biomarker profiling as a diagnostic platform for this category of patients and to compare these results with similarly obtained results from a group of patients with acute neuroborreliosis.

Methods And Findings: Two groups of patient cohorts (Cohort 1 and 2) were analyzed for biomarkers in serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF); the results were used for group-level comparison.

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