Thiamine (vitamin B1) is an essential micronutrient required as a cofactor in many metabolic processes. Clinical symptoms of thiamine deficiency are poorly defined, hence biomarkers of thiamine status are important. The erythrocyte transketolase activity coefficient (ETKac) is a sensitive measure of thiamine status, but its interpretation may be co...
Published in Journal of Cancer
Despite apparently having completed surgical resection, approximately half of resected early-stage lung cancer patients relapse and die of their disease. Adjuvant chemotherapy reduces this risk by only 5% to 8%. Thus, there is a need for better identifying the drivers of relapse, who benefits from adjuvant therapy, and novel targets in this setting...
Published in In Silico Pharmacology
The growing resistance to the current antimalarial drugs in the absence of a vaccine can be effectively tackled by identifying new metabolic pathways that are essential to the survival of the malaria parasite and developing new drugs against them. Triterpenes and steroids are the most abundant group of natural products with a great variety of biolo...
Published in European journal of pharmacology
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality and causes more than a million deaths per year. Gefitinib is the first-line agent of advanced lung cancer, however, resistance to gefitinib becomes a major problem in clinical application. Transketolase (TKT) is a key enzyme functioning between the oxidative arm and the non-oxidative arm ...
peer reviewed / Thiamine (vitamin B1) is an essential molecule for all living organisms. It is the precursor for several phosphorylated derivatives, the most important being the coenzyme thiamine diphosphate (ThDP). Thiamine is transported into cells by specific transporters and pyrophosphorylated to ThDP in the cytosol. ThDP is an essential cofact...
Published in Malaria Journal
BackgroundPlasmodial transketolase (PTKT) enzyme is one of the novel pharmacological targets being explored as potential anti-malarial drug target due to its functional role and low sequence identity to the human enzyme. Despite this, features contributing to such have not been exploited for anti-malarial drug design. Additionally, there are no ant...
Vitamin B1 (thiamine) is an essential nutrient that acts as a cofactor for a number of metabolic processes, particularly in energy metabolism. Symptoms of classic thiamine deficiency are recognized as beriberi, although clinical symptoms are nonspecific and recognition of subclinical deficiency is difficult. Therefore, reliable biomarkers of thiami...
Published in International Journal of Molecular Sciences
The synthetic properties of the Thiamine diphosphate (ThDP)-dependent pyruvate dehydrogenase E1 subunit from Escherichia coli ( Ec PDH E1) was assessed for carboligation reactions with aliphatic ketoacids. Due to its role in metabolism, Ec PDH E1 was previously characterised with respect to its biochemical properties, but it was never applied for s...
Published in Microbial Cell Factories
BackgroundDuring the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP), two important components, NADPH and pentoses, are provided to the cell. Previously it was shown that this metabolic pathway is a source of reducing agent for lipid synthesis from glucose in the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. Y. lipolytica is an attractive microbial host since it is able to convert u...
An efficient enzymatic method catalyzed by an enzyme from the d-threonine aldolase (DTA) family was developed for d-serine production at industrial scale. This process was used for the synthesis of two valuable ketoses, l-erythrulose and d-fructose, within the cascade enzymatic concept involving two other enzymes. Indeed, d-serine was used as a sub...
