Jinyuan Sun

Chinese Academy of Sciences | CAS · Institute of Microbiology

The utilization of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) has caused significant and prolonged ecological repercussions. Enzymatic degradation is an environmentally friendly approach to addressing PET contamination. Hydrolysis of mono(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (MHET), a competitively inhibited intermediate in PET degradation, is catalyzed by MHET deg...

Biotechnological plastic recycling has emerged as a suitable option for addressing the pollution crisis. A major breakthrough in the biodegradation of poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) is achieved by using a LCC variant, which permits 90% conversion at an industrial level. Despite the achievements, its applications have been hampered by the remain...

The escalating demand for biocatalysts in pharmaceutical and biochemical applications underscores the critical imperative to enhance enzyme activity and durability under high denaturant concentrations. Nevertheless, the development of a practical computational redesign protocol for improving enzyme tolerance to denaturants is challenging due to the...

We introduce a deep learning-based ligand pose scoring model called zPoseScore for predicting protein-ligand complexes in the 15th Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP15). Our contributions are threefold: first, we generate six training and evaluation data sets by employing advanced data augmentation and sampling methods. Secon...

Predicting free energy changes (∆∆G) is of paramount significance in advancing our comprehension of protein evolution and holds profound implications for protein engineering and pharmaceutical development. Traditional methods, however, often suffer from limitations such as sluggish computational speed or heavy reliance on biased training datasets....

Biotechnological plastic depolymerization and recycling have emerged as suitable options for addressing the plastic-waste pollution crisis in a circular plastic economy. Enzymatic degradation of poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), as the most typical representative, has evolved over the past two decades, with a major breakthrough achieved by using...

Recently, the monkeypox virus has begun to spread in many countries worldwide [1]. The genome sequence of the monkeypox virus variant responsible for the current outbreak has been reported, thus providing an important resource for better understanding the new variant and accelerating vaccine and drug development. Here, we report structure predictio...

l-heptopyranoses are important components of bacterial polysaccharides and biological active secondary metabolites like septacidin (SEP), which represents a group of nucleoside antibiotics with antitumor, antifungal, and pain-relief activities. However, little is known about the formation mechanisms of those l-heptose moieties. In this study, we de...

Rebaudioside M (RebM) is a desired natural non-caloric and high potency sweetener with very low content in the leaves of Stevia rebaudiana. In this study, based on the crystal structure of UDP-dependent glycosyltransferase UGT76G1, a key enzyme responsible for RebM production in S. rebaudiana, a computational strategy combining protein structure, m...

Proteins are fundamental molecules that mediate diverse biological processes, and protein design can shed light on the molecular mechanisms underlying their biological functions. Huang and colleagues have developed a sequence-independent statistical model for de novo protein design using neural networks (NNs) to learn the distribution of backbone s...

Rising demands for enzymes in biotechnological applications have fueled efforts to tailor their properties towards desired functions, such as activity, selectivity, and stability. Computational methods are increasingly used in this task, providing designs that efficiently navigate large regions of sequence space with a greatly reduced experimental...

The development of base editing (BE) technology has opened a new avenue for research studies in bacteriology, particularly for bacterial species in which the DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) introduced by CRISPR/Cas system would lead to cell death. However, a major limitation of BE-mediated gene editing is the restricted editable sites in the target...

Nature harbors fascinating enzymatic catalysts with high efficiency, chemo-, regio- and stereoselectivity. However, the insufficient stability of the enzymes often prevents their widespread utilization for industrial processes. Not content with the finite repertoire of naturally occurring enzymes, protein engineering holds promises to extend the ap...

Eicosapentaenoic acid is one of the most important ω-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, playing essential roles in the treatment of cardiovascular, cancer and other physiological diseases. However, fish oil-derived eicosapentaenoic acid cannot meet the growing needs, which makes the microbial production of eicosapentaenoic acid has become the current r...

Biological detoxification techniques have been developed by using microorganisms such as bacteria, yeast, and fungi to eliminate mycotoxin contamination. However, due to the lack of molecular details of related enzymes, the underlying mechanism of detoxification of many mycotoxins remain unclear. On the other hand, the next generation sequencing te...

The use of 2-ketoacids is very common in feeds, food additives and pharmaceuticals, and 2-ketoacids are valuable precursors for a plethora of chemically diverse compounds. Biocatalytic synthesis of 2-ketoacids starting from L-amino acids would be highly desirable, since the substrates are readily available from biomass feedstock. Here, we report bi...

The manufacture of biofuels from cellulose is regarded as one of practicable strategies to meet increasing energy demand and alleviate environmental issues. Cellulases, which play an important role in the production of second-generation biofuels, are expected to be highly thermostable, halostable and organic solvent-stable to adapt to the harsh con...