ArticleNature chemical biology2018
Discovery of enzymes for toluene synthesis from anoxic microbial communities.
Article in Nature chemical biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
- Enzymatic Basis for the Oxidative Branch of Aromatic Amino Acid Fermentation Leading to p-cresol Formation.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Directed evolution of hydrocarbon-producing enzymes.Biotechnology for biofuels and bioproducts · 2025Review
- Optogenetic patterning generates multi-strain biofilms with spatially distributed antibiotic resistance.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Discovery of a New Class of Aminoacyl Radical Enzymes Expands Nature's Known Radical Chemistry.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024Article
- Methyl-Based Methanogenesis: an Ecological and Genomic Review.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2023Review
- Mechanistic Studies of a Skatole-Forming Glycyl Radical Enzyme Suggest Reaction Initiation via Hydrogen Atom Transfer.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2022Article
- Microbial production of toluene in oxygen minimum zone waters in the Humboldt Current System off Chile.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Activity- and Enrichment-Based Metaproteomics Insights into Active Urease from the Rumen Microbiota of Cattle.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Rescuing activity of oxygen-damaged pyruvate formate-lyase by a spare part protein.The Journal of biological chemistry · 2021Article
- Correlation of Key Physiological Properties ofApplied and environmental microbiology · 2021Article
- Discovery of CC bond-forming and bond-breaking radical enzymes: enabling transformations for metabolic engineering.Current opinion in biotechnology · 2020Review
- Two radical-dependent mechanisms for anaerobic degradation of the globally abundant organosulfur compound dihydroxypropanesulfonate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Insight into the Mechanism of Phenylacetate Decarboxylase (PhdB), a Toluene-Producing Glycyl Radical Enzyme.Chembiochem : a European journal of chemical biology · 2020Article
- Chemo-enzymatic cascades to produce cycloalkenes from bio-based resources.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Hydrocarbon Synthesis via Photoenzymatic Decarboxylation of Carboxylic Acids.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2019Article
- Review
- On the Role of Bioinformatics and Data Science in Industrial Microbiome Applications.Frontiers in genetics · 2019Article
- Comparative Genomic Analysis Reveals Novel Microcompartment-Associated Metabolic Pathways in the Human Gut Microbiome.Frontiers in genetics · 2019Article
- Indoleacetate decarboxylase is a glycyl radical enzyme catalysing the formation of malodorant skatole.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Activity-Based Protein Profiling-Enabling Multimodal Functional Studies of Microbial Communities.Current topics in microbiology and immunologyReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbial toluene biosynthesis was reported in anoxic lake sediments more than three decades ago, but the enzyme catalyzing this biochemically challenging reaction has never been identified. Here we report the toluene-producing enzyme PhdB, a glycyl radical enzyme of bacterial origin that catalyzes phenylacetate decarboxylation, and its cognate activating enzyme PhdA, a radical S-adenosylmethionine enzyme, discovered in two distinct anoxic microbial communities that produce toluene. The unconventional process of enzyme discovery from a complex microbial community (>300,000 genes), rather than from a microbial isolate, involved metagenomics- and metaproteomics-enabled biochemistry, as well as in vitro confirmation of activity with recombinant enzymes. This work expands the known catalytic range of glycyl radical enzymes (only seven reaction types had been characterized previously) and aromatic-hydrocarbon-producing enzymes, and will enable first-time biochemical synthesis of an aromatic fuel hydrocarbon from renewable resources, such as lignocellulosic biomass, rather than from petroleum.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.