Oct 2026· Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry· 26 references
Enzyme Catalysis and Immobilization
Abstract
Abstract Cassia seeds contain bioactive anthraquinones, including rhein and its glycosides, but their efficient production is limited by the low activity and poor regioselectivity of natural enzymes. Here, we identified NtUGT75C1 from Nicotiana tomentosiformis as a glycosyltransferase producing rhein-8-O-β-d-glucoside and rhein-1-O-β-d-glucoside. Loop dynamics were redesigned using the AI-informed constraints for protein engineering (AiCE) framework. The S55P mutant increased 8-O-glycoside formation more than 2-fold and also increased 1-O-glycoside formation. It displayed more than 80% of its maximum activity when assayed at 50 °C, and its nominal kcat/Km was 2.54-fold that of WT. Molecular dynamics simulations indicated increased local rigidity and redistributed flexibility, consistent with possible long-range allosteric coupling and a more localized low-free-energy basin. These findings identify an engineered glycosyltransferase candidate for modifying functional food components and demonstrate the utility of AiCE-guided loop engineering.
The comparison of adopter and non-adopter sample reveals three potential adoption inhibitor, security, data privacy, and portability, which underlines the importance of the technical and security perspectives for research investigating the adoption of technology.
Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, S. Samuel et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 111 citations· ⚡8
This study investigates how Lean internal startup facilitates software product innovation in large companies and identifies its enablers and inhibitors, and shows the potential of the method-in-action framework to investigate the Lean startup approach in non-startup context.
Henry Edison, Nina M. Smørsgård, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 78 citations· ⚡6
This paper highlights the challenges to conduct proper affect-related studies with psychology, provides a comprehensive literature review in affect theory, and proposes guidelines for conducting psychoempirical software engineering.
D. Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· SSE@SIGSOFT FSE· 56 citations· ⚡4
This study conducts a multiple case study on twenty European software startups and proposes a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups, and identifies factors that occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in earlystage software startups.
Anh Nguyen-Duc, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· International Conference on...· 44 citations· ⚡5
It is demonstrated that linker-free PROTACs can outperform traditional designs, marking a paradigm shift in PROTAC development for targeted protein degradation.
Pinal, a 16-billion-parameter foundation model that produces protein candidates from natural-language functional descriptions, supports natural language as a high-level interface for candidate generation in protein design, enabling programmable exploration with reduced reliance on manually specified structural or seque...
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
