Bjarke Christensen

Plectasin is a peptide antibiotic with therapeutic potential from a saprophytic fungus

Animals and higher plants express endogenous peptide antibiotics called defensins. These small cysteine-rich peptides are active against bacteria, fungi and viruses. Here we describe plectasin—the first defensin to be isolated from a fungus, the saprophytic ascomycete Pseudoplectania nigrella. Plectasin has primary, secondary and tertiary structures that closely resemble those of defensins found in spiders, scorpions, dragonflies and mussels. Recombinant plectasin was produced at a very high, and commercially viable, yield and purity. In vitro, the recombinant peptide was especially active against Streptococcus pneumoniae, including strains resistant to conventional antibiotics. Plectasin showed extremely low toxicity in mice, and cured them of experimental peritonitis and pneumonia caused by S. pneumoniae as efficaciously as vancomycin and penicillin. These findings identify fungi as a novel source of antimicrobial defensins, and show the therapeutic potential of plectasin. They also suggest that the defensins of insects, molluscs and fungi arose from a common ancestral gene.

Phenotypic characterization of glucose repression mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae using experiments with 13C‐labelled glucose

In the field of metabolic engineering and functional genomics, methods for analysis of metabolic fluxes in the cell are attractive as they give an overview of the phenotypic response of the cells at the level of the active metabolic network. This is unlike several other high‐throughput experimental techniques, which do not provide information about the integrated response a specific genetic modification has on the cellular function. In this study we have performed phenotypic characterization of several mutants of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae through the use of experiments with 13C‐labelled glucose. Through GC–MS analysis of the 13C incorporated into the amino acids of cellular proteins, it was possible to obtain quantitative information on the function of the central carbon metabolism in the different mutants. Traditionally, such labelling data have been used to quantify metabolic fluxes through the use of a suitable mathematical model, but here we show that the raw labelling data may also be used directly for phenotypic characterization of different mutant strains. Different glucose derepressed strains investigated employed are the disruption mutants reg1, hxk2, grr1, mig1 and mig1mig2 and the reference strain CEN.PK113‐7D. Principal components analysis of the summed fractional labelling data show that deleting the genes HXK2 and GRR1 results in similar phenotype at the fluxome level, with a partial alleviation of glucose repression on the respiratory metabolism. Furthermore, deletion of the genes MIG1, MIG1/MIG2 and REG1 did not result in a significant change in the phenotype at the fluxome level. Copyright

Metabolic characterization of high- and low-yielding strains of Penicillium chrysogenum

Abstract A recently developed method for analyzing metabolic networks using 13C-labels was employed for investigating the metabolism of a high- and a low-yielding strain of Penicillium chrysogenum. Under penicillin-producing conditions, the flux through the pentose phosphate (PP) pathway in the high- and the low-yielding strains was estimated to 70 and 66, respectively. When the high-yielding strain was cultivated in a medium without the penicillin side chain precursor, phenoxyacetic acid, the PP pathway flux was estimated as 71. Thus, in all three experiments, the flux through the PP pathway was almost constant with an average value of 69 ± 3, and the method therefore allows for a very reproducible estimation of the PP pathway flux. Phenoxyacetic acid was found to be a source of cytosolic acetyl-CoA and thereby a source of precursors for the biosynthesis of 2-aminoadipic acid, which is a central amino acid in penicillin biosynthesis. However, the labeling patterns also indicated the presence of an unrecognized pathway to cytosolic acetyl-CoA.

Transcriptional Profile of Escherichia coli in Response to Novispirin G10

Using a novel methodology, we have investigated the transcriptional response of Escherichia coli to novispirin G10, an α-helical cationic antimicrobial peptide. We show that novispirin G10 induces an exceptionally coherent transcriptional response in E. coli, resulting in upregulation of genes involved in response to osmotic stress, acid shock, phage shock, and antimicrobial peptides, and down-regulation of the heat shock response genes, e.g., dnaJK, GroES, and GroEL. This transcriptional pattern indicates that novispirin G10 acts by compromising the bacterial membrane and possibly also by targeting the heat shock response. The impact of novispirin G10 on E. coli cells was monitored directly using the fluorescent LIVE/DEAD assay verifying that the peptide, indeed, targets bacterial membranes. Furthermore, in agreement with the observed heat shock transcriptional response, we show that overexpression of the heat shock transcription factor in E. coli, σ32, leads to a significant decrease in sensitivity towards novispirin G10.