Jian Chen

Interaction-driven chorismate metabolic reprogramming underlies Bacillus–Pediococcus synergistic thermogenesis in high-temperature Daqu

High-temperature Daqu (HTD), the essential solid-state fermentation starter for premium Moutai-flavor Baijiu, reaches a peak temperature of 60–65 °C driven by microbial metabolic heat; yet the detailed metabolic mechanism underlying the Bacillus–Pediococcus thermogenic synergy remains largely unresolved. This study int...

Constructing nucleoside deaminase-assisted orthogonal DNA replication system for continuous evolution in prokaryotes.

NDAORep accelerates the evolution of regulatory elements, protein functions, and metabolic pathways, establishing a powerful platform for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.

Replicon engineering-driven modular synthetic biology toolkit for efficiently iterative genome editing in Fusarium venenatum.

Fusarium venenatum is the most widely used filamentous fungus for biomass-based microbial protein production mainly used as meat analogs. However, insufficient iterative genome editing and lack of synthetic biology tools for fine-tuning gene expression limited engineering of F. venenatum for improved traits. Here, repl...

Spatiotemporal Metabolic Regulation for Programmable Microbial Cell Factories.

Plasmid- and Inducer-Free Biosynthesis of Difucosyllactose through Rational Fusion Enzyme Engineering and Systematic Pathway Optimization.

Difucosyllactose (DFL), a fucosylated human milk oligosaccharide, exhibits significant application potential in the food and pharmaceutical industries. However, the microbial production of DFL faces challenges such as the accumulation of the intermediate 2'-fucosyllactose (2'-FL) and the high costs associated with the...

Computationally Guided Engineering of Multi-Enzyme Cascades Enables Efficient Trehalose Biosynthesis.

Trehalose is a nonreducing disaccharide widely used for its biomolecule-protective properties. However, multienzyme cascade production remains limited by low enzyme expression and suboptimal catalytic performance. To address this, thermostable maltooligosyltrehalose synthase (TreY) and trehalohydrolase (TreZ) from Arth...

Precursor supply and translational machinery engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for improving cellular protein content and biomass-based microbial protein bioproduction.

A multilevel engineering strategy to enhance yeast protein production by optimizing precursor supply, translation machinery, and diploid construction provides both improved protein content and key targets for breeding high-protein microbial strains.

Mechanism-Guided Synergistic Engineering of Substrate Access and Catalytic Microenvironment in Oxidosqualene Cyclase for Enhanced Amyrin Biosynthesis.

Oxidosqualene cyclases (OSCs) catalyze the cyclization of 2,3-oxidosqualene into diverse triterpenoids, yet their intrinsically low catalytic efficiency restricts biosynthetic productivity. Here, we establish a mechanism-guided synergistic engineering strategy that extends beyond conventional active-site engineering by...