25 research outputs found
Quantitative proteomic analysis of the influence of lignin on biofuel production by Clostridium acetobutylicum ATCC 824
Background: Clostridium acetobutylicum has been a focus of research because of its ability to produce high-value
compounds that can be used as biofuels. Lignocellulose is a promising feedstock, but the lignin–cellulose–hemicellulose
biomass complex requires chemical pre-treatment to yield fermentable saccharides, including cellulose-derived
cellobiose, prior to bioproduction of acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) and hydrogen. Fermentation capability is
limited by lignin and thus process optimization requires knowledge of lignin inhibition. The effects of lignin on cellular
metabolism were evaluated for C. acetobutylicum grown on medium containing either cellobiose only or cellobiose
plus lignin. Microscopy, gas chromatography and 8-plex iTRAQ-based quantitative proteomic technologies were
applied to interrogate the effect of lignin on cellular morphology, fermentation and the proteome.
Results: Our results demonstrate that C. acetobutylicum has reduced performance for solvent production when
lignin is present in the medium. Medium supplemented with 1 g L−1
of lignin led to delay and decreased solvents
production (ethanol; 0.47 g L−1
for cellobiose and 0.27 g L−1
for cellobiose plus lignin and butanol; 0.13 g L−1
for cellobiose
and 0.04 g L−1
for cellobiose plus lignin) at 20 and 48 h, respectively, resulting in the accumulation of acetic
acid and butyric acid. Of 583 identified proteins (FDR < 1 %), 328 proteins were quantified with at least two unique
peptides. Up- or down-regulation of protein expression was determined by comparison of exponential and stationary
phases of cellobiose in the presence and absence of lignin. Of relevance, glycolysis and fermentative pathways were
mostly down-regulated, during exponential and stationary growth phases in presence of lignin. Moreover, proteins
involved in DNA repair, transcription/translation and GTP/ATP-dependent activities were also significantly affected
and these changes were associated with altered cell morphology.
Conclusions: This is the first comprehensive analysis of the cellular responses of C. acetobutylicum to lignin at metabolic
and physiological levels. These data will enable targeted metabolic engineering strategies to optimize biofuel
production from biomass by overcoming limitations imposed by the presence of lignin
Complex and extensive post-transcriptional regulation revealed by integrative proteomic and transcriptomic analysis of metabolite stress response in Clostridium acetobutylicum
Fermentation of mixed substrates by Clostridium pasteurianum and its physiological, metabolic and proteomic characterizations
Cluster-Seeking James-Stein Estimators
This paper considers the problem of estimating a high-dimensional vector of parameters from a noisy observation. The noise vector is i.i.d. Gaussian with known variance. For a squared-error loss function, the James-Stein (JS) estimator is known to dominate the simple maximum-likelihood (ML) estimator when the dimension exceeds two. The JS-estimator shrinks the observed vector towards the origin, and the risk reduction over the ML-estimator is greatest for that lie close to the origin. JS-estimators can be generalized to shrink the data towards any target subspace. Such estimators also dominate the ML-estimator, but the risk reduction is significant only when lies close to the subspace. This leads to the question: in the absence of prior information about , how do we design estimators that give significant risk reduction over the ML-estimator for a wide range of ? In this paper, we propose shrinkage estimators that attempt to infer the structure of from the observed data in order to construct a good attracting subspace. In particular, the components of the observed vector are separated into clusters, and the elements in each cluster shrunk towards a common attractor. The number of clusters and the attractor for each cluster are determined from the observed vector. We provide concentration results for the squared-error loss and convergence results for the risk of the proposed estimators. The results show that the estimators give significant risk reduction over the ML-estimator for a wide range of , particularly for large . Simulation results are provided to support the theoretical claims
Empirical Bayes Estimators for Sparse Sequences.
The problem of estimating a high-dimensional sparse vector θ ∈ ℝ n from an observation in i.i.d. Gaussian noise is considered. An empirical Bayes shrinkage estimator, derived using a Bernoulli-Gaussian prior, is analyzed and compared with the well-known soft-thresholding estimator using squared-error loss as a measure of performance. We obtain concentration inequalities for the Stein's unbiased risk estimate and the loss function of both estimators. Depending on the underlying θ, either the proposed empirical Bayes (eBayes) estimator or soft-thresholding may have smaller loss. We consider a hybrid estimator that attempts to pick the better of the soft-thresholding estimator and the eBayes estimator by comparing their risk estimates. It is shown that: i) the loss of the hybrid estimator concentrates on the minimum of the losses of the two competing estimators, and ii) the risk of the hybrid estimator is within order 1/√n of the minimum of the two risks. Simulation results are provided to support the theoretical results