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Record W4411721740 · doi:10.1093/biomethods/bpaf050

Cost-effective production of <i>Escherichia coli</i> “GABase” for spectrophotometric determination of γ-aminobutyrate (GABA) levels or glutamate decarboxylase activity

2025· article· en· W4411721740 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

VenueBiology Methods and Protocols · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicGABA and Rice Research
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsGlutamate decarboxylaseEscherichia coliGlutamate receptorChemistryBiochemistryCarboxy-lyasesProduction (economics)EnzymeEconomicsGene

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract γ-aminobutyrate (GABA) is a non-proteinogenic amino acid produced by glutamate decarboxylase (GAD) that functions as a vital neurotransmitter in animals, and as an important metabolite and signaling molecule in plants and microbes. “GABase” consists of a mixture of recombinant GABA transaminase (GABA-T) and succinic semialdehyde dehydrogenase (SSDH) that is widely used for spectrophotometric quantification of glutamate decarboxylase (GAD) activity or GABA levels in tissue extracts. Both can be conveniently monitored at 340 nm owing to the sequential conversion of GABA into succinate by GABA-T and SSDH, and concomitant reduction of NADP+ into NADPH by SSDH. Currently, these assays rely on commercially available GABase from Pseudomonas fluorescens. However, the excessive cost of commercial GABase prompted us to develop an inexpensive and rapid “DIY” method for producing GABase by cloning, expressing and purifying His6-tagged GABA-T and SSDH from Escherichia coli. We validated our in-house GABase preparation by comparing GAD activities and GABA levels of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana with those obtained using commercial GABase. Both pET30a plasmids for expressing E. coli His6-GABA-T and His6-SSDH have been deposited into AddGene (www.addgene.com). Our protocols for producing and using recombinant E. coli GABase should be of interest to any researcher who studies eukaryotic or prokaryotic GABA and/or GAD activity.

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)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
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 score0.381
Threshold uncertainty score0.226

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
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 science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
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 head0.135
GPT teacher head0.470
Teacher spread0.336 · 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