Publicaties

Synthetic biology greatly accelerated the building process of potential microbial cell factories for the production of industrially relevant compounds, e.g., chitooligosaccharides (COS) which have an enormous application potential in multiple industries, i.e., pharma, cosmetics and agrifood. COS are produced by the heterologous expression of the chitin oligosaccharide synthase, NodC, in Escherichia coli, mainly yielding mixtures of ...

Background : Engineering bacteria with the purpose of optimizing the production of interesting molecules often leads to a decrease in growth due to metabolic burden or toxicity. By delaying the production in time, these negative effects on the growth can be avoided in a process called a two-stage fermentation. Main text : During this two-stage fermentation process, the production stage is only activated once sufficient cell mass is obtained. ...

LysR-type transcriptional regulators (LTTRs) are emerging as a promising group of macromolecules for the field of biosensors. As the largest family of bacterial transcription factors, the LTTRs represent a vast and mostly untapped repertoire of sensor proteins. To fully harness these regulators for transcription factor-based biosensor development, it is crucial to understand their underlying mechanisms and functionalities. In the first part, ...

In industrial biotechnology, integrating pathway enzymes allows for the complex conversion of basic substrates into valuable chemicals. Despite significant advancements at the laboratory scale, in vitro enzyme cascades still lack economic viability for large-scale production of bio-based chemicals. Colocalizing cooperating enzymes on synthetic protein scaffolds has been proposed to enhance pathway efficiency through substrate channeling, though ...

Quorum sensing serves as a communication technique utilized by bacteria to monitor the cell density in their environment. These quorum sensing systems have attracted a lot of attention as building blocks in the construction of genetic circuits, allowing the design of population-level regulated circuits, such as noise regulation or the creation of consortia comprising communicating bacterial strains. Moreover, these systems offer great ...

Quorum sensing serves as a communication technique utilized by bacteria to monitor the cell density in their environment. These quorum sensing systems have attracted a lot of attention as building blocks in the construction of genetic circuits, allowing the design of population-level regulated circuits, such as noise regulation or the creation of consortia comprising communicating bacterial strains. Moreover, these systems offer great ...

Promoter sequences are important genetic control elements. Through their interaction with RNA polymerase they determine transcription strength and specificity, thereby regulating the first step in gene expression. Consequently, they can be targeted as elements to control predictability and tuneability of a genetic circuit, which is essential in applications such as the development of robust microbial cell factories. This review considers the ...

Background Engineering bacterial strains to redirect the metabolism towards the production of a specific product has enabled the development of industrial biotechnology. However, rewiring the metabolism can have severe implications for a microorganism, rendering cells with stress symptoms such as a decreased growth rate, impaired protein synthesis, genetic instability and an aberrant cell size. On an industrial scale, this is reflected in ...

CRISPRi is a powerful technique to repress gene expression in a targeted and highly efficient manner. However, this potency is a double-edged sword in inducible systems, as even leaky expression of guide RNA results in a repression phenotype, complicating applications such as dynamic metabolic engineering. We evaluated three methods to enhance the controllability of CRISPRi by modulating the level of free and DNA-bound guide RNA complexes. ...