Publications by authors named "Zhengyan Guo"

An adequate understanding of the NO interacting chemistry is a prerequisite for a smoother transition to carbon-lean and carbon-free fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen. In this regard, this study presents a comprehensive study on the H atom abstraction by NO from C to C alkynes, dienes, and trienes forming 3 HNO isomers (i.e.

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Digitoxose, a significant 2,6-dideoxyhexose found in nature, exists in many small-molecule natural products. These digitoxose-containing natural products can be divided into steroids, macrolides, macrolactams, anthracyclines, quinones, enediynes, acyclic polyene, indoles and oligosaccharides, that exhibit antibacterial, anti-viral, antiarrhythmic, and antitumor activities respectively. As most of digitoxose-containing natural products for clinical application or preclinical tests, this review also summarizes the biosynthesis of digitoxose, and application of compound diversification by introducing sugar plasmids.

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Oxidative stress and inflammation responses are closely related to the occurrence and development of many diseases. Therefore, anti-oxidation and anti-inflammation have become hot spots in the treatment of diseases. A series of novel resveratrol derivatives which hybrid with benzoylhydrazines were designed, synthesized and assessed for their in vitro antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity.

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Bacterial persisters, a subpopulation of genetically susceptible cells that are normally dormant and tolerant to bactericides, have been studied extensively because of their clinical importance. In comparison, much less is known about the determinants underlying fungicide-tolerant fungal persister formation in vivo. Here, we report that during mouse lung infection, Cryptococcus neoformans forms persisters that are highly tolerant to amphotericin B (AmB), the standard of care for treating cryptococcosis.

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Background: Sea cucumbers exhibit a remarkable ability to regenerate damaged or lost tissues and organs, making them an outstanding model system for investigating processes and mechanisms of regeneration. They can also reproduce asexually by transverse fission, whereby the anterior and posterior bodies can regenerate independently. Despite the recent focus on intestinal regeneration, the molecular mechanisms underlying body wall regeneration in sea cucumbers still remain unclear.

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l-Heptopyranoses are important components of bacterial polysaccharides and biological active secondary metabolites like septacidin (SEP), which represents a group of nucleoside antibiotics with antitumor, antifungal, and pain-relief activities. However, little is known about the formation mechanisms of those l-heptose moieties. In this study, we deciphered the biosynthetic pathway of the l,l-gluco-heptosamine moiety in SEPs by functional characterizing four genes and proposed that SepI initiates the process by oxidizing the 4'-hydroxyl of l-glycero--d-manno-heptose moiety of SEP-328 () to a keto group.

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Natural cyclohexapeptide AFN A fromStreptomyces alboflavus 313 has moderate antibacterial and antitumor activities. An artificial designed AFN A homodimer, di-AFN A, is an antibiotic exhibiting 10 to 150 fold higher biological activities, compared with the monomer. Unfortunately, the yield of di-AFN A is very low (0.

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The human gut microbiome encodes a large variety of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), but the short lengths of AMPs pose a challenge for computational prediction. Here we combined multiple natural language processing neural network models, including LSTM, Attention and BERT, to form a unified pipeline for candidate AMP identification from human gut microbiome data. Of 2,349 sequences identified as candidate AMPs, 216 were chemically synthesized, with 181 showing antimicrobial activity (a positive rate of >83%).

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Septacidin is an adenine nucleoside antibiotic with antifungal and antitumor activities. During the efforts to construct a better septacidin producer, we obtained a high yield strain S. albus 1597 by putting the biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) of septacidin under the control of the constitutive strong promoter ermE*.

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Aurantinins (ARTs) are antibacterial polyketides featuring a unique 6/7/8/5-fused tetracyclic ring system and a triene side chain with a carboxyl terminus. Here we identify the art gene cluster and dissect ART's C-methyl incorporation patterns to study its biosynthesis. During this process, an apparently redundant methyltransferase Art28 was characterized as a malonyl-acyl carrier protein O-methyltransferase, which represents an unusual on-line methyl esterification initiation strategy for polyketide biosynthesis.

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Covering: up to 2020Glycosylated natural products hold great potential as drugs for the treatment of human and animal diseases. Heptoses, known as seven-carbon-chain-containing sugars, are a group of saccharides that are rarely observed in natural products. Based on the structures of the heptoses, the heptose-containing natural products can be divided into four groups, characterized by heptofuranose, highly-reduced heptopyranose, D-heptopyranose, and L-heptopyranose.

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As methicillin-resistant (MRSA) is becoming a serious pathogenic threaten to human health worldwide, there is an urgent need to discover new antibiotics for the treatment of MRSA infections. Alboflavusins (AFNs) are a group of halogenated cyclohexapeptides with anti-MRSA activities. In this study, two novel brominated AFN congeners (compounds and ) were isolated from the wild-type strain sp.

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This work presents a novel and green analytical procedure involving a deep eutectic solvent-based dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction with solidification of floating organic droplets (DES-DLLME-SFOD) followed by HPLC to measure three pyrethroids (bifenthrin, β-cypermethrin, and deltamethrin) in cereal samples. Firstly, a low-density hydrophobic DES was synthesized from thymol and octanoic acid in the molar ratio of 1/4 and this was applied as a green extraction solvent in the DLLME procedure to avoid the use of a toxic extractant. After centrifugation and placing it on an ice bath, it is transformed into a solid phase on the top of the sample solution to reduce the loss of extractant, conducive to convenient collection thereafter.

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Avermectin (AVM) refers to eight macrolides containing a common l-oleandrosyl disaccharide chain indispensable to their antiparasitic bioactivities. We delineated the biosynthetic pathway of TDP-β-l-oleandrose (), the sugar donor of AVM, by characterizing AveBVIII, AveBV, and AveBVII as TDP-sugar 3-ketoreductase, 5-epimerase, and 3--methyltransferase, respectively. On the basis of this pathway, we successfully reconstituted the biosynthesis of in .

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Septacidin () represents a group of nucleoside antibiotics possessing a unique -glycosylated adenine core. They exhibit some fascinating bioactivities that are rare for other nucleoside antibiotics. Here we demonstrate that this unique structure in septacidin is formed by SepE and SepF.

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Mutanobactins (MUBs) and their congeners that contain a macrocycle and/or a thiazepane ring are lipopeptides from , a major causative agent of dental caries. Here we show that the C-terminal reductase domain of MubD releases the lipohexapeptide intermediates in an aldehyde form, which enables a spontaneous C-C macrocyclization. In the presence of a thiol group, the macrocyclized MUBs can further undergo spontaneous C-S bond formation and C-C bond cleavage to generate diverse MUB congeners.

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The interspecies communication roles of γ-butyrolactones (GBLs) have been described for a long time but are still poorly understood. Herein, we analyzed more than 1000 Streptomyces strains and noticed a big quantitative gap between the strains with GBL biosynthetic genes and the strains with GBL receptor genes, which implies the wide-spread of GBLs as interspecies signals in Streptomyces and their great potential in the activation of silent natural product gene clusters. Streptomyces albidoflavus J1074, which has one GBL receptor gene but no GBL biosynthetic gene, was chosen as a target to study the possible interspecies communication roles of GBLs.

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Anaerobic bacteria represent an overlooked rich source of biological and chemical diversity. Due to the challenge of cultivation and genetic intractability, assessing the capability of their biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) for secondary metabolite production requires an efficient heterologous expression system. However, this kind of host system is still unavailable.

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Alboflavusins (AFNs) are a group of cyclohexapeptides with moderate antibacterial and antitumor activities from Streptomyces alboflavus sp. 313. In vivo and in vitro studies proposed that AFNs are biosynthesized by a nonribosomal peptide synthetase machinery, and the 6-Cl--Trp precursor is supplied by a tryptophan halogenase gene located outside the afn gene cluster.

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Along with the fast developing of DNA sequencing technology, a great number of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters have been discovered by bioinformatic analysis, which demands novel high-throughput genome mining methods to obtain the diverse compounds dictated by those gene clusters. In this work, a method based on the reporter gene was established to screen for the activation conditions of thirteen different gene clusters from CGMCC 4.1386.

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Seven pradimicin-like polyketides were isolated from the dichloromethane extract of the marine sediment-derived Streptosporangium sp. CGMCC 4.7309, including five new hexaricins, D-H (1-5), and known hexaricins A (6) and C (7).

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Seven-carbon-chain-containing sugars exist in several groups of important bacterial natural products. Septacidin represents a group of l-heptopyranoses containing nucleoside antibiotics with antitumor, antifungal, and pain-relief activities. Hygromycin B, an aminoglycoside anthelmintic agent used in swine and poultry farming, represents a group of d-heptopyranoses-containing antibiotics.

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Frogeye leaf spot, caused by Cercospora sojina Hara, is a common disease of soybean in most soybean-growing countries of the world. In this study, we report a high-quality genome sequence of C. sojina by Single Molecule Real-Time sequencing method.

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Neomycins are a group of aminoglycoside antibiotics with both clinical and agricultural applications. To elucidate the regulatory mechanism of neomycin biosynthesis, we completed draft genome sequencing of a neomycin producer Streptomyces fradiae CGMCC 4.7387 from marine sediments, and the neomycin biosynthesis gene cluster was identified.

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Many novel microbial nature products were discovered from Actinobacteria by genome mining methods. However, only a few number of genome mining works were carried out in rare actinomycetes. An important reason precluding the genome mining efforts in rare actinomycetes is that most of them are recalcitrant to genetic manipulation.

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