Fruit pomace and waste frying oil as sustainable resources for the bioproduction of medium-chain-length polyhydroxyalkanoates.

Medium-chain-length polyhydroxyalkanoates (mcl-PHAs) are biobased and biodegradable alternatives to petrol-derived polymers, whose break-through has been prevented by high production cost. Therefore we investigated whether wastes from the food industry (nine types of fruit pomace including apricots, cherries and grapes, and waste frying oil) could replace the costly sugars and fatty acids typically used as carbon substrates for the bacterial fermentations. A selection of enzyme preparations was tested for converting the residual polysaccharides from the pomaces into fermentable monosaccharides.

Strategies in mass spectrometry for the assignment of Cys-Cys disulfide connectivities in proteins.

Elucidating disulfide linkage patterns is a crucial part of protein characterization, for which mass spectrometry (MS) is now an indispensable analytical tool. In many cases, MS-based disulfide connectivity assignment is straightforwardly achieved using one-step protein fragmentation in the unreduced form followed by mass measurement of bridged fragments. By contrast, venom proteins, which are receiving increasing interest as potential therapeutics, are a challenge for MS-based disulfide assignment due to their numerous closely spaced cysteines and knotted disulfide structure, requiring creative strategies to determine their connectivity.

Affinity chromatography and capillary electrophoresis for analysis of the yeast ribosomal proteins.

We present a top down separation platform for yeast ribosomal proteins using affinity chromatography and capillary electrophoresis which is designed to allow deposition of proteins onto a substrate. FLAG tagged ribosomes were affinity purified, and rRNA acid precipitation was performed on the ribosomes followed by capillary electrophoresis to separate the ribosomal proteins. Over 26 peaks were detected with excellent reproducibility (<0.