Recent Advancements in Microbial Polysaccharides: Synthesis and Applications

Polysaccharide materials are widely applied in different applications including food, food packaging, drug delivery, tissue engineering, wound dressing, wastewater treatment, and bioremediation sectors. They were used in these domains due to their efficient, cost-effective, non-toxicity, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. As is known, polysaccharides can be synthesized by different simple, facile, and effective methods. Of these polysaccharides are cellulose, Arabic gum, sodium alginate, chitosan, chitin, curdlan, dextran, pectin, xanthan, pullulan, and so on. In this current article review, we focused on discussing the synthesis and potential applications of microbial polysaccharides. The biosynthesis of polysaccharides from microbial sources has been considered. Moreover, the utilization of molecular biology tools to modify the structure of polysaccharides has been covered. Such polysaccharides provide potential characteristics to transfer toxic compounds and decrease their resilience to the soil. Genetically modified microorganisms not only improve yield of polysaccharides, but also allow economically efficient production. With the rapid advancement of science and medicine, biosynthesis of polysaccharides research has become increasingly important. Synthetic biology approaches can play a critical role in developing polysaccharides in simple and facile ways. In addition, potential applications of microbial polysaccharides in different fields with a particular focus on food applications have been assessed.

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Bacterial cellulose for food applications

International Journal of Advances in Medical Biotechnology - IJAMB ◽

10.25061/2595-3931/ijamb/2018.v1i2.17 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 2 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Henriette MC Azeredo

Keyword(s):

Bacterial Cellulose ◽

Biomedical Applications ◽

Food Industry ◽

Cellulose Nanofibrils ◽

Food Product ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Food Applications ◽

Potential Food ◽

Fermentation Media

Bacterial cellulose (BC), which is usually produced as pure membranes (sheets) by some bacteria, has been widely studied as a nanomaterial with unique properties for a variety of applications, but it has been actually used mostly for biomedical applications. There are many potential food applications that have not been adequately explored, nata de coco being virtually the only food product from BC on the market. Food applications have usually been considered as less economically feasible, but several studies had demonstrated the suitability of cost-effective fermentation media for producing BC, widening its scope of applications. BC may be used in foods as intact membranes impregnated with other components, or after disintegration or hydrolysis to produce bacterial cellulose nanofibrils or nanocrystals. Abrief overview of actual and potential applications of bacterial cellulose in food industry is presented.

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Transgenesis as a Tool for the Efficient Production of Selected Secondary Metabolites from Plant in Vitro Cultures

Plants ◽

10.3390/plants9020132 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 132 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Tomasz Kowalczyk ◽

Joanna Wieczfinska ◽

Ewa Skała ◽

Tomasz Śliwiński ◽

Przemysław Sitarek

Keyword(s):

Secondary Metabolites ◽

Plant Secondary Metabolites ◽

Cost Effective ◽

In Vitro Cultures ◽

Efficient Production ◽

Green Biotechnology ◽

Plant Culture ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Health Promoting

The plant kingdom abounds in countless species with potential medical uses. Many of them contain valuable secondary metabolites belonging to different classes and demonstrating anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antimicrobial or antidiabetic properties. Many of these metabolites, e.g., paclitaxel, vinblastine, betulinic acid, chlorogenic acid or ferrulic acid, have potential applications in medicine. Additionally, these compounds have many therapeutic and health-promoting properties. The growing demand for these plant secondary metabolites forces the use of new green biotechnology tools to create new, more productive in vitro transgenic plant cultures. These procedures have yielded many promising results, and transgenic cultures have been found to be safe, efficient and cost-effective sources of valuable secondary metabolites for medicine and industry. This review focuses on the use of various in vitro plant culture systems for the production of secondary metabolites.

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Potential Pharmaceutical and Food Applications of Postbiotics: A Review

Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology ◽

10.2174/1389201021666200516154833 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 21 (15) ◽

pp. 1576-1587 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Aziz H. Rad ◽

Amin Abbasi ◽

Hossein S. Kafil ◽

Khudaverdi Ganbarov

Keyword(s):

Functional Foods ◽

Animal Health ◽

Pharmaceutical Formulations ◽

Live Cells ◽

Beneficial Effects ◽

Safe Product ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Food Applications ◽

Potential Alternative ◽

Bioactive Agents

In recent decades, functional foods with ingredients comprising probiotics, prebiotics and postbiotics have been gaining a lot of attention from scientists. Probiotics and postbiotics are usually applied in pharmaceutical formulations and/or commercial food-based products. These bioactive agents can be associated with host eukaryotic cells and have a key role in maintaining and restoring host health. The review describes the concept of postbiotics, their quality control and potential applications in pharmaceutical formulations and commercial food-based products for health promotion, prevention of disease and complementary treatment. Despite the effectiveness of probiotic products, researchers have introduced the concept of postbiotic to optimize their beneficial effects as well as to meet the needs of consumers to provide a safe product. The finding of recent studies suggests that postbiotics might be appropriate alternative agents for live probiotic cells and can be applied in medical, veterinary and food practice to prevent and to treat some diseases, promote animal health status and develop functional foods. Presently scientific literature confirms that postbiotics, as potential alternative agents, may have superiority in terms of safety relative to their parent live cells, and due to their unique characteristics in terms of clinical, technological and economical aspects, can be applied as promising tools in the drug and food industry for developing health benefits, and therapeutic aims.

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Natural Tyrosinase Inhibitors: Role of Herbals in the Treatment of Hyperpigmentary Disorders

Mini-Reviews in Medicinal Chemistry ◽

10.2174/1389557519666190116101039 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 19 (10) ◽

pp. 796-808 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Kamal Uddin Zaidi ◽

Sharique A. Ali ◽

Ayesha Ali ◽

Ishrat Naaz

Keyword(s):

Critical Role ◽

Enzymatic Browning ◽

Melanin Production ◽

Natural Sources ◽

Pigmentary Disorders ◽

Normal Manner ◽

Abnormal Accumulation ◽

Current Article ◽

Tyrosinase Inhibitors

Cutaneous pigmentation plays critical role in determining the color of skin along with photo protection of skin from dreadful effects of ultraviolet radiations. Conversely, abnormal accumulation of melanin is responsible for hyper pigmentary disorders such as melasma, senile lentigines and freckles. Because of the visible nature of dermatologic diseases, they have a considerable psychosomatic effect on affected patients. Tyrosinase inhibitors are molecules that interrelate in some way with the enzyme to prevent it from working in the normal manner. Past many decades witnessed the quest for the development of natural tyrosinase inhibitors due to imperative role played by tyrosinase in the process of melanogenesis and fungi or fruit enzymatic browning. Mechanism of pigmentation is characterized by the intact process of the synthesis of specialized black pigment within melanosomes. Melanin is synthesized by a cascade of enzymatic and chemical reactions. For this reason, melanin production is mainly controlled by the expression and activation of tyrosinase. In the current article, we discussed tyrosinase inhibitors from the natural sources, which can be an essential constituent of cosmetics products and depigmenting agents for the treatment of hyperpigmentory disorders.

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Hydrogen production from water electrolysis: role of catalysts

Nano Convergence ◽

10.1186/s40580-021-00254-x ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Shan Wang ◽

Aolin Lu ◽

Chuan-Jian Zhong

Keyword(s):

Hydrogen Production ◽

Water Splitting ◽

Noble Metal ◽

Active Sites ◽

Current Knowledge ◽

Low Cost ◽

Critical Role ◽

Water Electrolysis ◽

Efficient Production ◽

Production Of Hydrogen

AbstractAs a promising substitute for fossil fuels, hydrogen has emerged as a clean and renewable energy. A key challenge is the efficient production of hydrogen to meet the commercial-scale demand of hydrogen. Water splitting electrolysis is a promising pathway to achieve the efficient hydrogen production in terms of energy conversion and storage in which catalysis or electrocatalysis plays a critical role. The development of active, stable, and low-cost catalysts or electrocatalysts is an essential prerequisite for achieving the desired electrocatalytic hydrogen production from water splitting for practical use, which constitutes the central focus of this review. It will start with an introduction of the water splitting performance evaluation of various electrocatalysts in terms of activity, stability, and efficiency. This will be followed by outlining current knowledge on the two half-cell reactions, hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER), in terms of reaction mechanisms in alkaline and acidic media. Recent advances in the design and preparation of nanostructured noble-metal and non-noble metal-based electrocatalysts will be discussed. New strategies and insights in exploring the synergistic structure, morphology, composition, and active sites of the nanostructured electrocatalysts for increasing the electrocatalytic activity and stability in HER and OER will be highlighted. Finally, future challenges and perspectives in the design of active and robust electrocatalysts for HER and OER towards efficient production of hydrogen from water splitting electrolysis will also be outlined.

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Black Phosphorus-Molybdenum Disulfide Hetero-Junctions Formed with Ink-Jet Printing for Potential Solar Cell Applications with Indium-Tin-Oxide

Crystals ◽

10.3390/cryst11050560 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (5) ◽

pp. 560

Author(s):

Ravindra Ketan Mehta ◽

Anupama Bhat Kaul

Keyword(s):

Electrical Properties ◽

Molybdenum Disulfide ◽

Tin Oxide ◽

Indium Tin Oxide ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Contact Materials ◽

Ito Glass ◽

The Future ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Jet Printing

In this work, we implemented liquid exfoliation to inkjet-print two-dimensional (2D) black phosphorous (BP) and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) p–n heterojunctions on a standard indium tin oxide (ITO) glass substrate in a vertical architecture. We also compared the optical and electrical properties of the inkjet-printed BP layer with that of the MoS2 and the electrical properties of the mechanically exfoliated MoS2 with that of the inkjet-printed MoS2. We found significant differences in the optical characteristics of the inkjet-printed BP and MoS2 layers attributed to the differences in their underlying crystal structure. The newly demonstrated liquid exfoliated and inkjet-printed BP–MoS2 2D p–n junction was also compared with previous reports where mechanically exfoliated BP–MoS2 2D p–n junction were used. The electronic transport properties of mechanically exfoliated MoS2 membranes are typically better compared to inkjet-printed structures but inkjet printing offers a cost-effective and quicker way to fabricate heterostructures easily. In the future, the performance of inkjet-printed structures can be further improved by employing suitable contact materials, amongst other factors such as modifying the solvent chemistries. The architecture reported in this work has potential applications towards building solar cells with solution processed 2D materials in the future.

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Sporulation in solventogenic and acetogenic clostridia

Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology ◽

10.1007/s00253-021-11289-9 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Mamou Diallo ◽

Servé W. M. Kengen ◽

Ana M. López-Contreras

Keyword(s):

Current Knowledge ◽

Carbon Sources ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Biotechnological Production ◽

Key Points ◽

Wide Range ◽

Potential Applications ◽

A Cell ◽

Sporulation Initiation ◽

Solventogenic Clostridia

AbstractThe Clostridium genus harbors compelling organisms for biotechnological production processes; while acetogenic clostridia can fix C1-compounds to produce acetate and ethanol, solventogenic clostridia can utilize a wide range of carbon sources to produce commercially valuable carboxylic acids, alcohols, and ketones by fermentation. Despite their potential, the conversion by these bacteria of carbohydrates or C1 compounds to alcohols is not cost-effective enough to result in economically viable processes. Engineering solventogenic clostridia by impairing sporulation is one of the investigated approaches to improve solvent productivity. Sporulation is a cell differentiation process triggered in bacteria in response to exposure to environmental stressors. The generated spores are metabolically inactive but resistant to harsh conditions (UV, chemicals, heat, oxygen). In Firmicutes, sporulation has been mainly studied in bacilli and pathogenic clostridia, and our knowledge of sporulation in solvent-producing or acetogenic clostridia is limited. Still, sporulation is an integral part of the cellular physiology of clostridia; thus, understanding the regulation of sporulation and its connection to solvent production may give clues to improve the performance of solventogenic clostridia. This review aims to provide an overview of the triggers, characteristics, and regulatory mechanism of sporulation in solventogenic clostridia. Those are further compared to the current knowledge on sporulation in the industrially relevant acetogenic clostridia. Finally, the potential applications of spores for process improvement are discussed.Key Points• The regulatory network governing sporulation initiation varies in solventogenic clostridia.• Media composition and cell density are the main triggers of sporulation.• Spores can be used to improve the fermentation process.

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Graph contextualized attention network for predicting synthetic lethality in human cancers

Bioinformatics ◽

10.1093/bioinformatics/btab110 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Yahui Long ◽

Min Wu ◽

Yong Liu ◽

Jie Zheng ◽

Chee Keong Kwoh ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Synthetic Lethality ◽

Critical Role ◽

Design Feature ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Attention Network ◽

New Genes ◽

Lab Experiments ◽

Proposed Model ◽

Multiple Feature ◽

Wet Lab

Abstract Motivation Synthetic Lethality (SL) plays an increasingly critical role in the targeted anticancer therapeutics. In addition, identifying SL interactions can create opportunities to selectively kill cancer cells without harming normal cells. Given the high cost of wet-lab experiments, in silico prediction of SL interactions as an alternative can be a rapid and cost-effective way to guide the experimental screening of candidate SL pairs. Several matrix factorization-based methods have recently been proposed for human SL prediction. However, they are limited in capturing the dependencies of neighbors. In addition, it is also highly challenging to make accurate predictions for new genes without any known SL partners. Results In this work, we propose a novel graph contextualized attention network named GCATSL to learn gene representations for SL prediction. First, we leverage different data sources to construct multiple feature graphs for genes, which serve as the feature inputs for our GCATSL method. Second, for each feature graph, we design node-level attention mechanism to effectively capture the importance of local and global neighbors and learn local and global representations for the nodes, respectively. We further exploit multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to aggregate the original features with the local and global representations and then derive the feature-specific representations. Third, to derive the final representations, we design feature-level attention to integrate feature-specific representations by taking the importance of different feature graphs into account. Extensive experimental results on three datasets under different settings demonstrated that our GCATSL model outperforms 14 state-of-the-art methods consistently. In addition, case studies further validated the effectiveness of our proposed model in identifying novel SL pairs. Availability Python codes and dataset are freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/longyahui/GCATSL) and Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/4522679) under the MIT license.

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Revisión: Fibroína de seda y sus potenciales aplicaciones en empaques biodegradables para alimentos/Review: silk fibroin and their potential applications on biodegradable food packaging

Prospectiva ◽

10.15665/rp.v15i1.685 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 7-15 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Angel Daniel Rios Osorio ◽

Catalina Alvarez-Lopéz ◽

Luis Javier Cruz Riaño ◽

Adriana Restrepo-Osorio

Keyword(s):

Silk Fibroin ◽

Food Packaging ◽

Potential Applications

En el presente artículo se hace una revisión bibliográfica de la fibroína de seda (FS) y sus potenciales aplicaciones en empaques biodegradables de alimentos. Son cuatro temas principales en los que se centra el artículo: empaques, biopolímeros en empaques, FS y finalmente, la FS en empaques para alimentos. Razones como el cuidado del medioambiente y uso responsable de los recursos, al igual que la necesidad de desarrollar materiales biodegradables, han promovido investigaciones con diferentes biopolímeros, entre los que se encuentra la FS. Esta proteína representa cerca del 70% de la fibra de seda y puede ser obtenida a partir de capullos de primera calidad o de los desperdicios generados en la producción serícola. Dependiendo del método con el que se obtenga la FS, se pueden tener diferentes características fisicoquímicas que pueden diversificar las áreas de interés y las aplicaciones de la misma. En el caso de empaques para alimentos, la FS puede conferirle al empaque ciertas propiedades, como: aumento de la permeabilidad de oxígeno, resistencia a la rotura, efecto antimicrobiano y una mayor velocidad de degradación del biopolímero.

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Synthesis and Conductivity Studies of Poly(Methyl Methacrylate) (PMMA) by Co-Polymerization and Blending with Polyaniline (PANi)

Polymers ◽

10.3390/polym13121939 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (12) ◽

pp. 1939

Author(s):

Helyati Abu Hassan Shaari ◽

Muhammad Mahyiddin Ramli ◽

Mohd Nazim Mohtar ◽

Norizah Abdul Rahman ◽

Azizan Ahmad

Keyword(s):

Methyl Methacrylate ◽

Mechanical Stability ◽

Chemical Properties ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Poly Methyl Methacrylate ◽

Conducting Materials ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Polymerization Condition ◽

Physical And Chemical ◽

And Chemical Properties

Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) is a lightweight insulating polymer that possesses good mechanical stability. On the other hand, polyaniline (PANi) is one of the most favorable conducting materials to be used, as it is easily synthesized, cost-effective, and has good conductivity. However, most organic solvents have restricted potential applications due to poor mechanical properties and dispersibility. Compared to PANi, PMMA has more outstanding physical and chemical properties, such as good dimensional stability and better molecular interactions between the monomers. To date, many research studies have focused on incorporating PANi into PMMA. In this review, the properties and suitability of PANi as a conducting material are briefly reviewed. The major parts of this paper reviewed different approaches to incorporating PANi into PMMA, as well as evaluating the modifications to improve its conductivity. Finally, the polymerization condition to prepare PMMA/PANi copolymer to improve its conductivity is also discussed.

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