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11 Publications visible to you, out of a total of 11

Abstract (Expand)

Microalgae comprise a phylogenetically very diverse group of photosynthetic unicellular pro- and eukaryotic organisms growing in marine and other aquatic environments. While they are well explored for the generation of biofuels, their potential as a source of antimicrobial and prebiotic substances have recently received increasing interest. Within this framework, microalgae may offer solutions to the societal challenge we face, concerning the lack of antibiotics treating the growing level of antimicrobial resistant bacteria and fungi in clinical settings. While the vast majority of microalgae and their associated microbiota remain unstudied, they may be a fascinating and rewarding source for novel and more sustainable antimicrobials and alternative molecules and compounds. In this review, we present an overview of the current knowledge on health benefits of microalgae and their associated microbiota. Finally, we describe remaining issues and limitation, and suggest several promising research potentials that should be given attention.

Authors: Ines Krohn, Simon Menanteau‐Ledouble, Gunhild Hageskal, Yekaterina Astafyeva, Pierre Jouannais, Jeppe Lund Nielsen, Massimo Pizzol, Alexander Wentzel, Wolfgang R. Streit

Date Published: 29th May 2022

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

Streptomyces coelicolor M1152 is a widely used host strain for the heterologous production of novel small molecule natural products, genetically engineered for this purpose through e.g. deletion of four of its native biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) for improved precursor supply. Regardless of its potential, a systems understanding of its tight regulatory network and the effects of the significant genomic changes in M1152 is missing. In this study, we compare M1152 to its ancestor M145, thereby connecting observed phenotypic differences to changes on transcription and translation. Measured protein levels are connected to predicted metabolic fluxes, facilitated by an enzyme-constrained genome-scale model (GEM), that by itself is a consensus result of a community effort. This approach connects observed differences in growth rate and glucose consumption to changes in central carbon metabolism, accompanied by differential expression of important regulons. Results suggest that precursors supply is not limiting secondary metabolism, informing that alternative strategies will be beneficial for further development of S. coelicolor for heterologous production of novel compounds.

Authors: Snorre Sulheim, Tjaša Kumelj, Dino van Dissel, Ali Salehzadeh-Yazdi, Chao Du, Gilles P. van Wezel, Kay Nieselt, Eivind Almaas, Alexander Wentzel, Eduard J Kerkhoven

Date Published: 8th Oct 2019

Publication Type: Unpublished

Abstract

Not specified

Authors: Tjaša Kumelj, Snorre Sulheim, Alexander Wentzel, Eivind Almaas

Date Published: 7th Dec 2018

Publication Type: Not specified

Abstract (Expand)

BACKGROUND: Systems biology approaches to study metabolic switching in Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2) depend on cultivation conditions ensuring high reproducibility and distinct phases of culture growth and secondary metabolite production. In addition, biomass concentrations must be sufficiently high to allow for extensive time-series sampling before occurrence of a given nutrient depletion for transition triggering. The present study describes for the first time the development of a dedicated optimized submerged batch fermentation strategy as the basis for highly time-resolved systems biology studies of metabolic switching in S. coelicolor A3(2). RESULTS: By a step-wise approach, cultivation conditions and two fully defined cultivation media were developed and evaluated using strain M145 of S. coelicolor A3(2), providing a high degree of cultivation reproducibility and enabling reliable studies of the effect of phosphate depletion and L-glutamate depletion on the metabolic transition to antibiotic production phase. Interestingly, both of the two carbon sources provided, D-glucose and L-glutamate, were found to be necessary in order to maintain high growth rates and prevent secondary metabolite production before nutrient depletion. Comparative analysis of batch cultivations with (i) both L-glutamate and D-glucose in excess, (ii) L-glutamate depletion and D-glucose in excess, (iii) L-glutamate as the sole source of carbon and (iv) D-glucose as the sole source of carbon, reveal a complex interplay of the two carbon sources in the bacterium's central carbon metabolism. CONCLUSIONS: The present study presents for the first time a dedicated cultivation strategy fulfilling the requirements for systems biology studies of metabolic switching in S. coelicolor A3(2). Key results from labelling and cultivation experiments on either or both of the two carbon sources provided indicate that in the presence of D-glucose, L-glutamate was the preferred carbon source, while D-glucose alone appeared incapable of maintaining culture growth, likely due to a metabolic bottleneck at the oxidation of pyruvate to acetyl-CoA.

Authors: A. Wentzel, P. Bruheim, A. Overby, O. M. Jakobsen, H. Sletta, W. A. Omara, D. A. Hodgson, T. E. Ellingsen

Date Published: 9th Jun 2012

Publication Type: Not specified

Abstract (Expand)

Determining transcriptional regulator activities is a major focus of systems biology, providing key insight into regulatory mechanisms and co-regulators. For organisms such as Escherichia coli, transcriptional regulator binding site data can be integrated with expression data to infer transcriptional regulator activities. However, for most organisms there is only sparse data on their transcriptional regulators, while their associated binding motifs are largely unknown. Here, we address the challenge of inferring activities of unknown regulators by generating de novo (binding) motifs and integrating with expression data. We identify a number of key regulators active in the metabolic switch, including PhoP with its associated directed repeat PHO box, candidate motifs for two SARPs, a CRP family regulator, an iron response regulator and that for LexA. Experimental validation for some of our predictions was obtained using gel-shift assays. Our analysis is applicable to any organism for which there is a reasonable amount of complementary expression data and for which motifs (either over represented or evolutionary conserved) can be identified in the genome.

Authors: M. Iqbal, Y. Mast, R. Amin, D. A. Hodgson, W. Wohlleben, N. J. Burroughs

Date Published: 13th Mar 2012

Publication Type: Not specified

Abstract (Expand)

A metabolite profiling study of the antibiotic producing bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2) has been performed. The aim of this study was to monitor intracellular metabolite pool changes occurring as strains of S. coelicolor react to nutrient depletion with metabolic re-modeling, so-called metabolic switching, and transition from growth to secondary metabolite production phase. Two different culture media were applied, providing depletion of the key nutrients phosphate and L-glutamate, respectively, as the triggers for metabolic switching. Targeted GC-MS and LC-MS methods were employed to quantify important primary metabolite groups like amino acids, organic acids, sugar phosphates and other phosphorylated metabolites, and nucleotides in time-course samples withdrawn from fully-controlled batch fermentations. A general decline, starting already in the early growth phase, was observed for nucleotide pools and phosphorylated metabolite pools for both the phosphate and glutamate limited cultures. The change in amino acid and organic acid pools were more scattered, especially in the phosphate limited situation while a general decrease in amino acid and non-amino organic acid pools was observed in the L-glutamate limited situation. A phoP deletion mutant showed basically the same metabolite pool changes as the wild-type strain M145 when cultivated on phosphate limited medium. This implies that the inactivation of the phoP gene has only little effect on the detected metabolite levels in the cell. The energy charge was found to be relatively constant during growth, transition and secondary metabolite production phase. The results of this study and the employed targeted metabolite profiling methodology are directly relevant for the evaluation of precursor metabolite and energy supply for both natural and heterologous production of secondary metabolites in S. coelicolor.

Authors: A. Wentzel, H. Sletta, T. E. Ellingsen, P. Bruheim

Date Published: 2012

Publication Type: Not specified

Abstract (Expand)

Bacteria in the genus Streptomyces are soil-dwelling oligotrophs and important producers of secondary metabolites. Previously, we showed that global messenger RNA expression was subject to a series of metabolic and regulatory switches during the lifetime of a fermentor batch culture of Streptomyces coelicolor M145. Here we analyze the proteome from eight time points from the same fermentor culture and, because phosphate availability is an important regulator of secondary metabolite production, compare this to the proteome of a similar time course from an S. coelicolor mutant, INB201 (DeltaphoP), defective in the control of phosphate utilization. The proteomes provide a detailed view of enzymes involved in central carbon and nitrogen metabolism. Trends in protein expression over the time courses were deduced from a protein abundance index, which also revealed the importance of stress pathway proteins in both cultures. As expected, the DeltaphoP mutant was deficient in expression of PhoP-dependent genes, and several putatively compensatory metabolic and regulatory pathways for phosphate scavenging were detected. Notably there is a succession of switches that coordinately induce the production of enzymes for five different secondary metabolite biosynthesis pathways over the course of the batch cultures.

Authors: L. Thomas, D. A. Hodgson, A. Wentzel, K. Nieselt, T. E. Ellingsen, J. Moore, E. R. Morrissey, R. Legaie, W. Wohlleben, A. Rodriguez-Garcia, J. F. Martin, N. J. Burroughs, E. M. Wellington, M. C. Smith

Date Published: 8th Dec 2011

Publication Type: Not specified

Abstract (Expand)

GlnK is an important nitrogen sensor protein in Streptomyces coelicolor. Deletion of glnK results in a medium-dependent failure of aerial mycelium and spore formation and loss of antibiotic production. Thus, GlnK is not only a regulator of nitrogen metabolism but also of morphological differentiation and secondary metabolite production. Through a comparative transcriptomic approach between the S. coelicolor wild-type and a S. coelicolor glnK mutant strain, 142 genes were identified that are differentially regulated in both strains. Among these are genes of the ram and rag operon, which are involved in S. coelicolor morphogenesis, as well as genes involved in gas vesicle biosynthesis and ectoine biosynthesis. Surprisingly, no relevant nitrogen genes were found to be differentially regulated, revealing that GlnK is not an important nitrogen sensor under the tested conditions.

Authors: E. Waldvogel, A. Herbig, F. Battke, R. Amin, M. Nentwich, K. Nieselt, T. E. Ellingsen, A. Wentzel, D. A. Hodgson, W. Wohlleben, Y. Mast

Date Published: 29th Oct 2011

Publication Type: Not specified

Abstract (Expand)

Streptomyces coelicolor, the model species of the genus Streptomyces, presents a complex life cycle of successive morphological and biochemical changes involving the formation of substrate and aerial mycelium, sporulation and the production of antibiotics. The switch from primary to secondary metabolism can be triggered by nutrient starvation and is of particular interest as some of the secondary metabolites produced by related Streptomycetes are commercially relevant. To understand these events on a molecular basis, a reliable technical platform encompassing reproducible fermentation as well as generation of coherent transcriptomic data is required. Here, we investigate the technical basis of a previous study as reported by Nieselt et al. (BMC Genomics 11:10, 2010) in more detail, based on the same samples and focusing on the validation of the custom-designed microarray as well as on the reproducibility of the data generated from biological replicates. We show that the protocols developed result in highly coherent transcriptomic measurements. Furthermore, we use the data to predict chromosomal gene clusters, extending previously known clusters as well as predicting interesting new clusters with consistent functional annotations.

Authors: F. Battke, A. Herbig, A. Wentzel, O. M. Jakobsen, M. Bonin, D. A. Hodgson, W. Wohlleben, T. E. Ellingsen, K. Nieselt

Date Published: 25th Mar 2011

Publication Type: Not specified

Abstract (Expand)

We have constructed derivatives of Streptomyces coelicolor M145 as hosts for the heterologous expression of secondary metabolite gene clusters. To remove potentially competitive sinks of carbon and nitrogen, and to provide a host devoid of antibiotic activity, we deleted four endogenous secondary metabolite gene clusters from S. coelicolor M145--those for actinorhodin, prodiginine, CPK and CDA biosynthesis. We then introduced point mutations into rpoB and rpsL to pleiotropically increase the level of secondary metabolite production. Introduction of the native actinorhodin gene cluster and of gene clusters for the heterologous production of chloramphenicol and congocidine revealed dramatic increases in antibiotic production compared with the parental strain. In addition to lacking antibacterial activity, the engineered strains possess relatively simple extracellular metabolite profiles. When combined with liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, we believe that these genetically engineered strains will markedly facilitate the discovery of new compounds by heterologous expression of cloned gene clusters, particularly the numerous cryptic secondary metabolic gene clusters that are prevalent within actinomycete genome sequences.

Authors: Juan Pablo Gomez-Escribano, Mervyn J. Bibb

Date Published: 1st Mar 2011

Publication Type: Not specified

Abstract (Expand)

BACKGROUND: During the lifetime of a fermenter culture, the soil bacterium S. coelicolor undergoes a major metabolic switch from exponential growth to antibiotic production. We have studied gene expression patterns during this switch, using a specifically designed Affymetrix genechip and a high-resolution time-series of fermenter-grown samples. RESULTS: Surprisingly, we find that the metabolic switch actually consists of multiple finely orchestrated switching events. Strongly coherent clusters of genes show drastic changes in gene expression already many hours before the classically defined transition phase where the switch from primary to secondary metabolism was expected. The main switch in gene expression takes only 2 hours, and changes in antibiotic biosynthesis genes are delayed relative to the metabolic rearrangements. Furthermore, global variation in morphogenesis genes indicates an involvement of cell differentiation pathways in the decision phase leading up to the commitment to antibiotic biosynthesis. CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides the first detailed insights into the complex sequence of early regulatory events during and preceding the major metabolic switch in S. coelicolor, which will form the starting point for future attempts at engineering antibiotic production in a biotechnological setting.

Authors: , Florian Battke, Alexander Herbig, , , , , , , , , Edward R Morrissey, Miguel A Juarez-Hermosillo, , Merle Nentwich, , Mudassar Iqbal, , , , , , , , Michael Bonin, , , , , , , , , ,

Date Published: 28th May 2009

Publication Type: Not specified

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