Engineered Chimeras Unveil Swappable Modular Features of Fatty Acid and Polyketide Synthase Acyl Carrier Proteins.

The strategic redesign of microbial biosynthetic pathways is a compelling route to access molecules of diverse structure and function in a potentially environmentally sustainable fashion. The promise of this approach hinges on an improved understanding of acyl carrier proteins (ACPs), which serve as central hubs in biosynthetic pathways. These small, flexible proteins mediate the transport of molecular building blocks and intermediates to enzymatic partners that extend and tailor the growing natural products.

MIBiG 2.0: a repository for biosynthetic gene clusters of known function.

Fueled by the explosion of (meta)genomic data, genome mining of specialized metabolites has become a major technology for drug discovery and studying microbiome ecology. In these efforts, computational tools like antiSMASH have played a central role through the analysis of Biosynthetic Gene Clusters (BGCs). Thousands of candidate BGCs from microbial genomes have been identified and stored in public databases.

Tracking carrier protein motions with Raman spectroscopy.

Engineering microbial biosynthetic pathways represents a compelling route to gain access to expanded chemical diversity. Carrier proteins (CPs) play a central role in biosynthesis, but the fast motions of CPs make their conformational dynamics difficult to capture using traditional spectroscopic approaches. Here we present a low-resource method to directly reveal carrier protein-substrate interactions.

A standardized workflow for submitting data to the Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG) repository: prospects for research-based educational experiences.

Microorganisms utilize complex enzymatic pathways to biosynthesize structurally complex and pharmacologically relevant molecules. These pathways are encoded by gene clusters and are found in a diverse set of organisms. The Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster repository facilitates standardized and centralized storage of experimental data on these gene clusters and their molecular products, by utilizing user-submitted data to translate scientific discoveries into a format that can be analyzed computationally.