Extending Cofactor‐Tethered Nanomachines to Complex Multienzyme Redox Cascades in Continuous Flow
Zinnia Dsouza, Jan‐Simon Jeshua Friedrichs, Okke Melse, Gerhard Schenk, Volker Sieber · 2026
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Description
Dsouza and colleagues wire a ten step assembly line that turns glucose into isobutanol, a fuel and feedstock, while recycling its helper molecules instead of washing them away. Cell free cascades beat fermentation on control, but redox steps burn through nicotinamide cofactors. In flow reactors they drain off. Their 2026 study fuses the redox enzymes into pairs linked by peptide straps. Each strap carries one attachment point where a tagged cofactor is locked on permanently.
The machines kept working and made isobutanol in both batch and continuous flow runs with no free cofactor added. Each cofactor cycled through fourteen thousand rounds of use, among the highest counts for an anchored cofactor. Swapping in an ultrastable cofactor worked without redesign, showing its modularity. Self sufficient cascades like this, the authors argue, are a design template for cell free factories that run unattended, with the chemistry's wasteful consumable bolted down.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Zinnia Dsouza, Jan‐Simon Jeshua Friedrichs, Okke Melse, Gerhard Schenk, Volker Sieber |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 42 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |