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Biochemical and Biomolecular Engineering Commons

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Iowa State University

Zengyi Shao

Selected Works

Synthetic biology

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Biochemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Refactoring The Silent Spectinabilin Gene Cluster Using A Plug-And-Play Scaffold, Zengyi Shao, Guodong Rao, Chun Li, Zhanar Abil, Yunzi Luo, Huimin Zhao Jan 2013

Refactoring The Silent Spectinabilin Gene Cluster Using A Plug-And-Play Scaffold, Zengyi Shao, Guodong Rao, Chun Li, Zhanar Abil, Yunzi Luo, Huimin Zhao

Zengyi Shao

Natural products (secondary metabolites) are a rich source of compounds with important biological activities. Eliciting pathway expression is always challenging but extremely important in natural product discovery because an individual pathway is tightly controlled through a unique regulation mechanism and hence often remains silent under the routine culturing conditions. To overcome the drawbacks of the traditional approaches that lack general applicability, we developed a simple synthetic biology approach that decouples pathway expression from complex native regulations. Briefly, the entire silent biosynthetic pathway is refactored using a plug-and-play scaffold and a set of heterologous promoters that are functional in a heterologous …


Rapid Characterization And Engineering Of Natural Product Biosynthetic Pathways Via Dna Assembler, Zengyi Shao, Yunzi Luo, Huimin Zhao Jan 2011

Rapid Characterization And Engineering Of Natural Product Biosynthetic Pathways Via Dna Assembler, Zengyi Shao, Yunzi Luo, Huimin Zhao

Zengyi Shao

We report a synthetic biology strategy for rapid genetic manipulation of natural product biosynthetic pathways. Based on DNA assembler, this method synthesizes the entire expression vector containing the target biosynthetic pathway and the genetic elements required for DNA maintenance and replication in various hosts in a single-step manner through yeast homologous recombination, offering unprecedented flexibility and versatility in pathway manipulations.