Publications by authors named "Niaz Chowdhury"

During aerobic growth, relies on acetate overflow metabolism, a process where glucose is incompletely oxidized to acetate, for its bioenergetic needs. Acetate is not immediately captured as a carbon source and is excreted as waste by cells. The underlying factors governing acetate overflow in have not been identified.

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, the causative agent of syphilis, poses a significant global health threat. Its strict intracellular lifestyle and challenges in cultivation have impeded detailed metabolic characterization. In this study, we present iTP251, the first genome-scale metabolic model of , reconstructed and extensively curated to capture its unique metabolic features.

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During aerobic growth, relies on acetate overflow metabolism, a process where glucose is incompletely oxidized to acetate, for its bioenergetic needs. Acetate is not immediately captured as a carbon source and is excreted as waste by cells. The underlying factors governing acetate overflow in have not been identified.

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Article Synopsis
  • Neisseria gonorrhea (Ngo) poses a significant public health risk, particularly concerning reproductive health, making its metabolic understanding essential for tackling its pathogenicity.
  • The study utilized a metabolic model (iNgo_557) to show that low total cellular protein content restricts the activity of specific TCA cycle proteins, GltA and AcnB, leading Ngo to shift to acetate overflow for ATP production.
  • Increasing the protein content helps restore the activities of GltA and AcnB, postponing the acetate overflow, emphasizing the importance of protein allocation in Ngo's metabolic behavior and aiding in understanding its overall metabolic strategy.
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Unlabelled: Upon nutrient starvation, serovar L2 (CTL) shifts from its normal growth to a non-replicating form, termed persistence. It is unclear if persistence reflects an adaptive response or a lack thereof. To understand this, transcriptomics data were collected for CTL grown under nutrient-replete and nutrient-starved conditions.

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(Ngo) is a major concern for global public health due to its severe implications for reproductive health. Understanding its metabolic phenotype is crucial for comprehending its pathogenicity. Despite Ngo's ability to encode TCA cycle proteins, GltA and AcnB, their activities are notably restricted.

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Article Synopsis
  • On nutrient starvation, serovar L2 (CTL) transitions to a non-replicating "persistence" state, raising questions about whether this is an adaptive strategy or not.
  • Machine learning analysis of transcriptomics data shows significant changes in CTL’s gene expression under stress without a central regulatory mechanism, suggesting a lack of adaptive response.
  • Metabolic model analysis indicates that the gene phosphoglycerate mutase plays a crucial role in CTL's shift to persistence, with experiments confirming its essential function in this process, introducing new methods to study CTL persistence through thermodynamics and enzyme cost.
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Climate change has adversely affected maize productivity. Thereby, a holistic understanding of metabolic crosstalk among its organs is important to address this issue. Thus, we reconstructed the first multi-organ maize metabolic model, ZMA6517, and contextualized it with heat and cold stress transcriptomics data using expression distributed reaction flux measurement (EXTREAM) algorithm.

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Intestinal dysbiosis increases susceptibility to infection through the alteration of metabolic profiles, which increases morbidity. Zinc (Zn) homeostasis in mammals is tightly regulated by 24 Zn transporters. ZIP8 is unique in that it is required by myeloid cells to maintain proper host defense against bacterial pneumonia.

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Methanogenic archaea are important organisms in the global carbon cycle that grow by producing methane gas. is a methanogenic archaeum that can grow using methylated compounds, carbon monoxide, or acetate and produces renewable methane as a byproduct. However, there is limited knowledge of how combinations of substrates may affect metabolic fluxes in methanogens.

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Conveying biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) to photosynthetic species may be the next agricultural revolution, yet poses major engineering challenges. Liu et al. created a diazotrophic strain of a previously non-nitrogen-fixing species, the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp.

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Rhodopseudomonas palustris CGA009 is a Gram-negative purple nonsulfur bacterium that grows phototrophically by fixing carbon dioxide and nitrogen or chemotrophically by fixing or catabolizing a wide array of substrates, including lignin breakdown products for its carbon and fixing nitrogen for its nitrogen requirements. It can grow aerobically or anaerobically and can use light, inorganic, and organic compounds for energy production. Due to its ability to convert different carbon sources into useful products during anaerobic growth, this study reconstructed a metabolic and expression (ME) model of R.

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The growth and development of maize (Zea mays L.) largely depends on its nutrient uptake through the root. Hence, studying its growth, response, and associated metabolic reprogramming to stress conditions is becoming an important research direction.

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The reconstruction and analysis of metabolic models has garnered increasing attention due to the multitude of applications in which these have proven to be practical. The growing number of generated metabolic models has been accompanied by an exponentially expanding arsenal of tools used to analyze them. In this work, we discussed the biological relevance of a number of promising modeling frameworks, focusing on the questions and hypotheses each method is equipped to address.

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As the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2019/2020 unfolds, a COVID-19 'Immunity Passport' has been mooted as a way to enable individuals to return back to work. While the quality of antibody testing, the availability of vaccines, and the likelihood of even attaining COVID-19 immunity continue to be researched, we address the issues involved in providing tamper-proof and privacy-preserving certification for test results and vaccinations. We developed a prototype mobile phone app and requisite decentralized server architecture that facilitates instant verification of tamper-proof test results.

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Contact tracing has become a vital tool for public health officials to effectively combat the spread of new diseases, such as the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19. Contact tracing is not new to epidemiologist rather, it used manual or semi-manual approaches that are incredibly time-consuming, costly and inefficient. It mostly relies on human memory while scalability is a significant challenge in tackling pandemics.

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