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Record W4410202248 · doi:10.1016/j.crbiot.2025.100296

Phylogenetically distinct fungal expansins show different binding preferences towards cellulosic materials and enhance cellulase activity

2025· article· en· W4410202248 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueCurrent Research in Biotechnology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicPolysaccharides and Plant Cell Walls
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersH2020 Excellent ScienceJenny ja Antti Wihurin RahastoHorizon 2020 Framework ProgrammeBiocenter FinlandConcordia University
KeywordsCellulaseCellulosic ethanolCelluloseChemistryBiochemistry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Expansins and expansin-like proteins are found in plants and microbes, and can disrupt the cellulosic fiber network of plant cell walls. While plant expansins play a role in cell wall formation, microbial expansin-like proteins reportedly enhance the activity of cellulases. Herein, two novel fungal expansin-like proteins, Ama EXLX1 from Allomyces macrogynus and Apu EXLX1 from Aureobasidium pullulans , were recombinantly produced in Pichia pastoris . While both Ama EXLX1 and Apu EXLX1 retain typical expansin structure, they share low sequence identity (22.5 %) and different predicted pI values (5.8 and 8.8, respectively), which was expected to impact their action on cellulosic substrates. Accordingly, adsorption of the proteins on cellulose nanofibers (CNF) and the impact of the expansin-like proteins on the hydrolysis of CNF by an endoglucanase (Cel7B) was investigated using quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D). Ama EXLX1 showed higher affinity towards cellulose compared to Apu EXLX1, which was correlated to missing key aromatic residues in the polysaccharide binding surface of Apu EXLX1. The pretreatment of a CNF film with Ama EXLX1 and Apu EXLX1 increased the initial rate of Cel7B activity. This study underscores similarities between the impacts that bacterial and fungal expansin-like proteins can have on the enzymatic deconstruction of cellulose, and sequence properties that could impact expansin performance.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.300
Threshold uncertainty score0.401

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.070
GPT teacher head0.337
Teacher spread0.267 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it