Development of a small panel of SNPs to infer ancestry in Chileans that distinguishes Aymara and Mapuche components.

Background: Current South American populations trace their origins mainly to three continental ancestries, i.e. European, Amerindian and African.

Traceability, reproducibility and wiki-exploration for "à-la-carte" reconstructions of genome-scale metabolic models.

Genome-scale metabolic models have become the tool of choice for the global analysis of microorganism metabolism, and their reconstruction has attained high standards of quality and reliability. Improvements in this area have been accompanied by the development of some major platforms and databases, and an explosion of individual bioinformatics methods. Consequently, many recent models result from "à la carte" pipelines, combining the use of platforms, individual tools and biological expertise to enhance the quality of the reconstruction.

Reconstruction of the microalga Nannochloropsis salina genome-scale metabolic model with applications to lipid production.

Background: Nannochloropsis salina (= Eustigmatophyceae) is a marine microalga which has become a biotechnological target because of its high capacity to produce polyunsaturated fatty acids and triacylglycerols. It has been used as a source of biofuel, pigments and food supplements, like Omega 3. Only some Nannochloropsis species have been sequenced, but none of them benefit from a genome-scale metabolic model (GSMM), able to predict its metabolic capabilities.

A Consensus Genome-scale Reconstruction of Chinese Hamster Ovary Cell Metabolism.

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells dominate biotherapeutic protein production and are widely used in mammalian cell line engineering research. To elucidate metabolic bottlenecks in protein production and to guide cell engineering and bioprocess optimization, we reconstructed the metabolic pathways in CHO and associated them with >1,700 genes in the Cricetulus griseus genome. The genome-scale metabolic model based on this reconstruction, iCHO1766, and cell-line-specific models for CHO-K1, CHO-S, and CHO-DG44 cells provide the biochemical basis of growth and recombinant protein production.

Pantograph: A template-based method for genome-scale metabolic model reconstruction.

Genome-scale metabolic models are a powerful tool to study the inner workings of biological systems and to guide applications. The advent of cheap sequencing has brought the opportunity to create metabolic maps of biotechnologically interesting organisms. While this drives the development of new methods and automatic tools, network reconstruction remains a time-consuming process where extensive manual curation is required.

QTL dissection of Lag phase in wine fermentation reveals a new translocation responsible for Saccharomyces cerevisiae adaptation to sulfite.

Quantitative genetics and QTL mapping are efficient strategies for deciphering the genetic polymorphisms that explain the phenotypic differences of individuals within the same species. Since a decade, this approach has been applied to eukaryotic microbes such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae in order to find natural genetic variations conferring adaptation of individuals to their environment. In this work, a QTL responsible for lag phase duration in the alcoholic fermentation of grape juice was dissected by reciprocal hemizygosity analysis.

A genome-scale metabolic model of the lipid-accumulating yeast Yarrowia lipolytica.

Background: Yarrowia lipolytica is an oleaginous yeast which has emerged as an important microorganism for several biotechnological processes, such as the production of organic acids, lipases and proteases. It is also considered a good candidate for single-cell oil production. Although some of its metabolic pathways are well studied, its metabolic engineering is hindered by the lack of a genome-scale model that integrates the current knowledge about its metabolism.