Worldwide, there are plants known as psychoactive plants that naturally contain psychedelic active components. They have a high concentration of neuroprotective substances that can interact with the nervous system to produce psychedelic effects. Despite these plants' hazardous potential, recreational use of them is on the rise because of their psychoactive properties. Early neuroscience studies relied heavily on psychoactive plants and plant natural products (NPs), and both recreational and hazardous NPs have contributed significantly to the understanding of almost all neurotransmitter systems. Worldwide, there are many plants that contain psychoactive properties, and people have been using them for ages. Psychoactive plant compounds may significantly alter how people perceive the world.
1. Metab Eng. 2020 Sep;61:369-380. doi: 10.1016/j.ymben.2020.07.006. Epub 2020 Jul 24. Regulatory control circuits for stabilizing long-term anabolic product formation in yeast. D'Ambrosio V(1), Dore E(1), Di Blasi R(1), van den Broek M(2), Sudarsan S(1), Horst JT(1), Ambri F(1), Sommer MOA(1), Rugbjerg P(1), Keasling JD(3), Mans R(4), Jensen MK(5). Author information: (1)Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs, Lyngby, Denmark. (2)Department of Biotechnology, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. (3)Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs, Lyngby, Denmark; Joint BioEnergy Institute, Emeryville, CA, USA; Biological Systems and Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA; Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA; Center for Synthetic Biochemistry, Institute for Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technologies, Shenzhen, China. (4)Department of Biotechnology, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. Electronic address: R.Mans@tudelft.nl. (5)Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs, Lyngby, Denmark. Electronic address: mije@biosustain.dtu.dk. Engineering living cells for production of chemicals, enzymes and therapeutics can burden cells due to use of limited native co-factor availability and/or expression burdens, totalling a fitness deficit compared to parental cells encoded through long evolutionary trajectories to maximise fitness. Ultimately, this discrepancy puts a selective pressure against fitness-burdened engineered cells under prolonged bioprocesses, and potentially leads to complete eradication of high-performing engineered cells at the population level. Here we present the mutation landscapes of fitness-burdened yeast cells engineered for vanillin-β-glucoside production. Next, we design synthetic control circuits based on transcriptome analysis and biosensors responsive to vanillin-β-glucoside pathway intermediates in order to stabilize vanillin-β-glucoside production over ~55 generations in sequential passage experiments. Furthermore, using biosensors with two different modes of action we identify control circuits linking vanillin-β-glucoside pathway flux to various essential cellular functions, and demonstrate control circuits robustness and almost 2-fold higher vanillin-β-glucoside production, including 5-fold increase in total vanillin-β-glucoside pathway metabolite accumulation, in a fed-batch fermentation compared to vanillin-β-glucoside producing cells without control circuits. Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1016/j.ymben.2020.07.006 PMID: 32717328 [Indexed for MEDLINE] 2. Metab Eng Commun. 2015 Sep 11;2:99-108. doi: 10.1016/j.meteno.2015.09.001. eCollection 2015 Dec. Benchmarking two commonly used Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains for heterologous vanillin-β-glucoside production. Strucko T(1), Magdenoska O(1), Mortensen UH(1). Author information: (1)Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, 2800Kgs Lyngby, Denmark. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a widely used eukaryotic model organism and a key cell factory for production of biofuels and wide range of chemicals. From the broad palette of available yeast strains, the most popular are those derived from laboratory strain S288c and the industrially relevant CEN.PK strain series. Importantly, in recent years these two strains have been subjected to comparative "-omics" analyzes pointing out significant genotypic and phenotypic differences. It is therefore possible that the two strains differ significantly with respect to their potential as cell factories for production of specific compounds. To examine this possibility, we have reconstructed a de novo vanillin-β-glucoside pathway in an identical manner in S288c and CEN.PK strains. Characterization of the two resulting strains in two standard conditions revealed that the S288c background strain produced up to 10-fold higher amounts of vanillin-β-glucoside compared to CEN.PK. This study demonstrates that yeast strain background may play a major role in the outcome of newly developed cell factories for production of a given product. © 2015 The Authors. DOI: 10.1016/j.meteno.2015.09.001 PMCID: PMC8193238 PMID: 34150513