Publications by authors named "Hongwu Ma"

In pursuit of reliable and efficient industrial microbes, this study integrates cutting-edge systems biology tools with TD01, a robust halophilic bacterium. We generated the complete and annotated circular genome sequence for this model organism, constructed and meticulously curated a genome-scale metabolic network, achieving striking 86.32% agreement with Biolog Phenotype Microarray data and visualize the network via an interactive Electron/Thrift server architecture.

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Pullulan, a versatile water-soluble polysaccharide, is widely used across various industries. To minimize byproduct interference, Aureobasidium pullulans BL06ΔPMAs was engineered, resulting in a higher yield and a lower molecular weight (MW) than the parent strain A. pullulans BL06.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on enhancing microbial chassis cells, particularly the bacterium Zymomonas mobilis, for better performance in the circular economy.
  • Researchers improved the genome-scale metabolic model of Z. mobilis to overcome limitations in producing valuable biochemicals like D-lactate by introducing a new production pathway.
  • The findings also highlight the potential for commercialization and environmental benefits of using lignocellulosic materials for D-lactate production, paving the way for advancing biorefinery techniques.
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Article Synopsis
  • Efficient design of cell factories requires understanding and optimizing metabolic pathways, but accurately predicting how to exceed yield limits remains difficult, creating uncertainty about product enhancement strategies.* -
  • To tackle this issue, researchers developed a high-quality cross-species metabolic network model and a quantitative pathway design algorithm, evaluating 12,000 biosynthetic scenarios, which showed that over 70% of product yields could be improved by incorporating specific heterologous reactions.* -
  • The study identified 13 engineering strategies aimed at conserving carbon and energy, with 5 strategies applicable to more than 100 products, and introduced a web server that allows users to visualize and calculate yields and pathways effectively.*
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Enzymes play a crucial role in various industrial production and pharmaceutical developments, serving as catalysts for numerous biochemical reactions. Determining the optimal catalytic temperature () of enzymes is crucial for optimizing reaction conditions, enhancing catalytic efficiency, and accelerating the industrial processes. However, due to the limited availability of experimentally determined data and the insufficient accuracy of existing computational methods in predicting , there is an urgent need for a computational approach to predict the values of enzymes accurately.

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Genome editing is the basis for the modification of engineered microbes. In the process of genome editing, the design of editing sequences, such as primers and sgRNA, is very important for the accurate positioning of editing sites and efficient sequence editing. The whole process of genome editing involves multiple rounds and types of editing sequence design, while the development of related whole-workflow design tools for high-throughput experimental requirements lags.

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Utilizing standardized artificial regulatory sequences to fine-tuning the expression of multiple metabolic pathways/genes is a key strategy in the creation of efficient microbial cell factories. However, when regulatory sequence expression strengths are characterized using only a few reporter genes, they may not be applicable across diverse genes. This introduces great uncertainty into the precise regulation of multiple genes at multiple expression levels.

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Medicinal compounds from plants include bicyclo[3.3.1]nonane derivatives, the majority of which are polycyclic polyprenylated acylphloroglucinols (PPAPs).

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Article Synopsis
  • One major challenge in pathway design is selecting appropriate enzymes for non-natural reactions, with existing tools often failing to accurately find the best candidates.
  • *Existing tools struggle because similar reactions may not really be the same, there are many enzymes to sift through, and they lack interactive features for user customization.
  • *The REME platform is introduced as a solution, offering a range of functionalities like reaction ranking, filtering by specifics, and assessing enzyme attributes using deep learning, making it easier to identify suitable enzymes for new reactions.
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Background: Genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) serve as effective tools for understanding cellular phenotypes and predicting engineering targets in the development of industrial strain. Enzyme-constrained genome-scale metabolic models (ecGEMs) have emerged as a valuable advancement, providing more accurate predictions and unveiling new engineering targets compared to models lacking enzyme constraints. In 2022, a stoichiometric GEM, iDL1450, was reconstructed for the industrially significant fungus Myceliophthora thermophila.

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Article Synopsis
  • The molecular weight of enzymes is important for enzyme-constrained models, influenced by both the number of subunits and their abundance.
  • This study fills a gap by gathering subunit data from the UniProt database to create a benchmark dataset for analyzing enzyme structures.
  • The DeepSub model, which uses advanced techniques to predict the number of subunits in protein complexes, shows high accuracy (0.967) and successfully validates its predictions with existing literature on proteins that lack documented subunit information.
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Genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) have been widely employed to predict microorganism behaviors. However, GEMs only consider stoichiometric constraints, leading to a linear increase in simulated growth and product yields as substrate uptake rates rise. This divergence from experimental measurements prompted the creation of enzyme-constrained models (ecModels) for various species, successfully enhancing chemical production.

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Proteins play a pivotal role in coordinating the functions of organisms, essentially governing their traits, as the dynamic arrangement of diverse amino acids leads to a multitude of folded configurations within peptide chains. Despite dynamic changes in amino acid composition of an individual protein (referred to as AAP) and great variance in protein expression levels under different conditions, our study, utilizing transcriptomics data from four model organisms uncovers surprising stability in the overall amino acid composition of the total cellular proteins (referred to as AACell). Although this value may vary between different species, we observed no significant differences among distinct strains of the same species.

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Sulfur-oxidizing bacteria play a crucial role in various processes, including mine bioleaching, biodesulfurization, and treatment of sulfur-containing wastewater. Nevertheless, the pathway involved in sulfur oxidation is highly intricate, making it complete comprehension a formidable and protracted undertaking. The mechanisms of sulfur oxidation within the genus, along with the process of energy production, remain areas that necessitate further research and elucidation.

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The systematical characterization and understanding of the metabolic behaviors are the basis of the efficient plant metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. Genome-scale metabolic networks (GSMNs) are indispensable tools for the comprehensive characterization of overall metabolic profile. Here we first constructed a GSMN of tobacco, which is one of the most widely used plant chassis, and then combined the tobacco GSMN and multiomics analysis to systematically elucidate the impact of cultivation on the tobacco metabolic network.

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A1501 is a non-fluorescent denitrifying bacteria that belongs to the gram-negative bacterial group. As a prominent strain in the fields of agriculture and bioengineering, there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding its metabolic capabilities, specifically in terms of central metabolism and substrate utilization. Therefore, further exploration and extensive studies are required to gain a detailed insight into these aspects.

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Isopentyldiol (IPDO) is an important raw material in the cosmetic industry. So far, IPDO is exclusively produced through chemical synthesis. Growing interest in natural personal care products has inspired the quest to develop a biobased process.

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Metabolic network models have become increasingly precise and accurate as the most widespread and practical digital representations of living cells. The prediction functions were significantly expanded by integrating cellular resources and abiotic constraints in recent years. However, if unreasonable modeling methods were adopted due to a lack of consideration of biological knowledge, the conflicts between stoichiometric and other constraints, such as thermodynamic feasibility and enzyme resource availability, would lead to distorted predictions.

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To assess prefrontal brain network abnormality in adults with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), resting-state functional near infrared spectroscopy (rs-fNIRS) was used to evaluate 52 subjects, including 27 with OSA and 25 healthy controls (HC). The study found that patients with OSA had a decreased connection edge number, particularly in the connection between the right medial frontal cortex (MFG-R) and other right-hemisphere regions. Graph-based analysis also revealed that patients with OSA had a lower global efficiency, local efficiency, and clustering coefficient than the HC group.

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Various omics technologies are changing Biology into a data-driven science subject. Development of data-driven digital cell models is key for understanding system level organization and evolution principles of life, as well as for predicting cellular function under various environmental/genetic perturbations and subsequently for the design of artificial life. Consequently, the construction, analysis and design of digital cell models have become one of the core supporting technologies in synthetic biology.

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Utilization of carbon dioxide (CO) is a huge challenge for global sustainable development. Biological carbon fixation occurs in nature, but the low energy efficiency and slow speed hamper its commercialization. Physical-chemical carbon fixation is efficient, but relies on high energy consumption and often generates unwanted by-products.

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Gene expression in bacteria is regulated by multiple transcription factors. Clarifying the regulation mechanism of gene expression is necessary to understand bacterial physiological activities. To further understand the structure of the transcriptional regulatory network of Corynebacterium glutamicum, we applied independent component analysis, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, to the high-quality C.

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Allosteric feedback inhibition of the committed step in amino acid biosynthetic pathways is a major concern for production of amino acids at industrial scale. Anthranilate synthase (AS) catalyzes the first reaction of tryptophan biosynthetic pathway found in microorganisms and is feedback inhibited by its own product i.e.

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Vitamin B is an essential nutrient with extensive applications in the medicine, food, animal feed, and cosmetics industries. Pyridoxine (PN), the most common commercial form of vitamin B, is currently chemically synthesized using expensive and toxic chemicals. However, the low catalytic efficiencies of natural enzymes and the tight regulation of the metabolic pathway have hindered PN production by the microbial fermentation process.

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Regulation of amino acid's biosynthetic pathway is of significant importance to maintain homeostasis and cell functions. Amino acids regulate their biosynthetic pathway by end-product feedback inhibition of enzymes catalyzing committed steps of a pathway. Discovery of new feedback resistant enzyme variants to enhance industrial production of amino acids is a key objective in industrial biotechnology.

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