Carbohydrate-binding module O-mannosylation alters binding selectivity to cellulose and lignin

Improved understanding of the effect of protein glycosylation is expected to provide the foundation for the design of protein glycoengineering strategies. In this study, we examine the impact of O-glycosylation on the binding selectivity of a model Family 1 carbohydrate-binding module (CBM), which has been shown to be one of the primary sub-domains responsible for non-productive lignin binding in multi-modular cellulases. Specifically, we examine the relationship between glycan structure and the binding specificity of the CBM to cellulose and lignin substrates. We find that the glycosylation pattern of the CBM exhibits a strong influence on the binding affinity and the selectivity between both cellulose and lignin. In addition, the large set of binding data collected allows us to examine the relationship between binding affinity and the correlation in motion between pairs of glycosylation sites. Our results suggest that glycoforms displaying highly correlated motion in their glycosylation sites tend to bind cellulose with high affinity and lignin with low affinity. Taken together, this work helps lay the groundwork for future exploitation of glycoengineering as a tool to improve the performance of industrial enzymes.

Improved understanding of the effect of protein glycosylation is expected to provide the foundation for the design of protein glycoengineering strategies.

The cell walls of terrestrial plants primarily comprise the polysaccharides cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin, as well as the heterogeneous aromatic polymer, lignin. In nature, carbohydrates derived from plant polysaccharides provide a massive carbon and energy source for biomass-degrading fungi, bacteria, and archaea, which together are the primary organisms that recycle plant matter and are a critical component of the global carbon cycle. Across the various environments in which these microbes break down lignocellulose, a few known enzymatic and chemical systems have evolved to deconstruct polysaccharides to soluble sugars.^1–6 These natural systems are, in several cases, being evaluated for industrial use to produce sugars for further conversion into renewable biofuels and chemicals.From an industrial perspective, overcoming biomass recalcitrance to cost-effectively produce soluble intermediates, including sugars for further upgrading remains the main challenge in biomass conversion. Lignin, the evolution of which in planta provided a significant advantage for terrestrial plants to mitigate microbial attack, is now widely recognized as a primary cause of biomass recalcitrance.⁷ Chemical and/or biological processing scenarios of lignocellulose have been evaluated⁸ and several approaches have been scaled to industrial biorefineries to date. Many biomass conversion technologies overcome recalcitrance by partially or wholly removing lignin from biomass using thermochemical pretreatment or fractionation. This approach enables easier polysaccharide access for carbohydrate-active enzymes and/or microbes. There are however, several biomass deconstruction approaches that employ enzymes or microbes with whole, unpretreated biomass.^9,10 In most realistic biomass conversion scenarios wherein enzymes or microbes are used to depolymerize polysaccharides, native or residual lignin remains.^11,12 It is important to note that lignin can bind and sequester carbohydrate-active enzymes, which in turn can affect conversion performance.¹³Therefore, efforts aimed at improving cellulose binding selectivity relative to lignin have emerged as major thrusts in cellulase studies.^14–25 Multiple reports in the past a few years have made exciting new contributions to our collective understanding of how fungal glycoside hydrolases, which are among the most well-characterized cellulolytic enzymes given their importance to cellulosic biofuels production, bind to lignin from various pretreatments.^15,17 Taken together, these studies have demonstrated that the Family 1 carbohydrate-binding modules (CBMs) often found in fungal cellulases are the most relevant sub-domains for non-productive binding to lignin,^15,17,20,26 likely due to the hydrophobic face of these CBMs that is known to be also responsible for cellulose binding (Fig. 1).²⁷Open in a separate windowFig. 1Model of glycosylated CBM binding the surface of a cellulose crystal. Glycans are shown in green with oxygen atoms in red, tyrosines known to be critical to binding shown in purple, and disulfide bonds Cys8–Cys25 and Cys19–Cys35 in yellow.Furthermore, several studies have been published recently using protein engineering of Family 1 CBMs to improve CBM binding selectivity to cellulose with respect to lignin. Of particular note, Strobel et al. screened a large library of point mutations in both the Family 1 CBM and the linker connecting the catalytic domain (CD) and CBM.^21,22 These studies demonstrated that several mutations in the CBM and one in the linker led to improved cellulose binding selectivity compared to lignin. The emerging picture is that the CBM-cellulose interaction, which occurs mainly as a result of stacking between the flat, hydrophobic CBM face (which is decorated with aromatic residues) and the hydrophobic crystal face of cellulose I, is also likely the main driving force in the CBM-lignin interaction given the strong potential for aromatic–aromatic and hydrophobic interactions.Alongside amino acid changes, modification of O-glycosylation has recently emerged as a potential tool in engineering fungal CBMs, which Harrison et al. demonstrated to be O-glycosylated.^28–31 In particular, we have revealed that the O-mannosylation of a Family 1 CBM of Trichoderma reesei cellobiohydrolase I (TrCel7A) can lead to significant enhancements in the binding affinity towards bacterial microcrystalline cellulose (BMCC).^30,32,33 This observation, together with the fact that glycans have the potential to form both hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions with other molecules, led us to hypothesize that glycosylation may have a unique role in the binding selectivity of Family 1 CBMs to cellulose relative to lignin and as such, glycoengineering may be exploited to improve the industrial performance of these enzymes. To test this hypothesis, in the present study, we systematically probed the effects of glycosylation on CBM binding affinity for a variety of lignocellulose-derived cellulose and lignin substrates and investigated routes to computationally predict the binding properties of different glycosylated CBMs.     

Study of quasi-monodisperse In2O3 nanocrystals: synthesis and optical determination

In this communication, we report a successful synthesis of quasi-monodisperse In2O3 nanocrystals with high crystallinity in a high-temperature organic solution. The average size of nanocrystals can be tuned using a dynamic injection technique. TEM and XRD investigations indicate that each nanocrystal is a single crystal. The optical determination implies that the photoluminescence behavior of these In2O3 nanocrystals is different from that of the bulk, probably due to the combination of weak quantum-confinement-effects and the nature of high crystallinity in nanocrystals.     

交替三线性分解算法与反相高效液相-二极管阵列检测方法相结合同时测定苯二酚的位置异构体

 利用交替三线性分解算法与反相高效液相 二极管阵列检测 (RP HPLC DAD)相结合 ,在洗脱时间为1 0 86min～ 1 399min(间隔 1 / 1 50min)、紫外吸收波长为 2 68nm～ 2 98nm(间隔 1nm)时对苯二酚位置异构体的重叠及光谱体系进行了分辨研究。分辨结果与实际结果一致。同时测定了水溶液中共存的邻苯二酚、间苯二酚和对苯二酚的含量 ,回收率分别为 (1 0 0 1± 1 0 ) % ,(99 4± 1 4) % ,(1 0 0 5± 1 7) %。研究结果表明 :该方法定量快速准确 ,实验操作步骤简单 ,解决了在干扰物存在条件下三者很难同时分辨的问题。     

A Perturbation Approach to Vector Optimization Problems: Lagrange and Fenchel–Lagrange Duality

Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications - In this paper, we study a general minimization vector problem which is expressed in terms of a perturbation mapping defined on a product of locally...     

Existence results for superlinear semipositone 's

We consider the existence of positive solutions to the BVP

where . Our results extend some of the existing literature on superlinear semipositone problems and singular BVPs. Our proofs are quite simple and are based on fixed point theorems in a cone.

     

在"高聚物的结构与性能"课程中应该引入的几个新概念

在“高聚物的结构与性能”课程教学中，很有必要向学生介绍高分子科学近十几年来的发展，尤其是在高分子凝聚态基本物理问题上的研究成果以及相关的新概念、新知识，特别是我国学者的贡献。本文较为详细地讨论了近年来作者在教学中介绍的几个新概念，如：动态接触浓度、单链凝聚态、凝聚缠结等。     

A New Method to Investigate the Clustering Phenomena in Supercritical Fluids

EstimationoflocaldensityofsolventaboutthesoluteSolvatochromicbehaviorsofspectroscopicprobesarewidelyusedtoestimatethesol-ventstrengthofsupercriticalfluids(SCF,).i-3lnthiswork,thesolvatochrondcshiftofthen-n*transitionbandforacetone(O.o37mo1.L-')insupercrihcal(SC)CO2wasde-terminedbyUVspectroscopytostUdythesolvationeffect.TheMcRae-BaylissexpressionbasedonthedielectriccontinUUInmodelgivestherelahonshipbetWeenso1vatochromicshiftandpo1arizabilityofnonPolarsolvents4-5asfollows:wherevisthewave…     

Theoretical Study on the Structures and Stability of Isomers and Complex of[Si,C,O,O] Sytem

A detailed singlet potential energy surface(PES) of [Si,C,O,O] system including a van der Waals (vdW) comples SiO……CO2,eight isomers,and twelve transiton states is investigated by MP2 and QCISD(T) (single-point)methods.At the final QCISD(T)/6-311 G(2df)//MP2/6-311G(d) level with zero-point energy included,the complex SiO……CO is found to be thermodynamically and kinetically the most stable species.Although eight ismoers are located as local energy minima,they are rather unstable toward isomerization to the dissociation fragments or comples.For the reaction of silocon atoms with carbon dioxide,two competitive reaction channels are found,and the primary pathway,which leads to the products of SiO and CO fragments,is the direct oxygen-abstraction process from carbon dioxide by silicon atom with a41.16 kJ/mol reaction barrier height.Our predications are in good agreement with previous experimental and theoretical studies.