Nikhil U. Nair

This study evaluates 33 spore proteins for enzyme display on Bacillus subtilis spores, identifies SscA as the most effective carrier, and highlights challenges in predicting fusion compatibility.

The paper investigates the role of a dynamic loop in AvPAL by engineering disulfide bonds to restrict its mobility, revealing its regulatory function in substrate specificity.

This study improves natural transformation in Bacillus subtilis for genome and spore engineering by optimizing induction systems and culture conditions, achieving higher transformation efficiency and multiplex spore display.

This study evaluates different lactic acid bacteria as hosts for expressing phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL) and identifies strategies to enhance enzymatic activity in whole-cell biocatalysts.

This paper develops molecular probes to manipulate specific subpopulations in microbial communities using bacteriocins and validates them in synthetic populations.

This paper shows that engineered Vibrio natriegens lysate can replace fetal bovine serum and fibroblast-like growth factor 2 in cell culture media for cultivated meat, supporting cell proliferation and differentiation.

This paper describes a method to discover protein-small molecule hybrids using pharmacophore-driven antibody discovery on yeast, showing that screening outcomes are pharmacophore-dependent.

This paper describes a novel biochemical pathway using a phosphatase to reverse the Leloir pathway in E. coli, enabling direct tagatose synthesis from glucose with high yield.

This study identifies microbial lysates as a low-cost alternative to fetal bovine serum for cultivating meat cells in vitro.

The paper shows that specific codon usage patterns affect host fitness and gene expression, introducing a coding scheme called CHI to optimize multi-gene expression systems.

This paper introduces a metabolic coordinator, Gal3pMC, that enables efficient activation of the GAL regulon across diverse substrates, improving growth rates and substrate utilization in yeast.

The paper evaluates yeast-bacterial cell-cell interactions using flow cytometry and FACS to characterize nanobody-antigen binding.

This study shows that yeast can adapt rapidly to non-native substrates with minimal metabolic engineering by integrating non-native genes with a native regulon system.

The paper addresses false positive enrichment in biosensor-guided biocatalyst engineering by desensitizing biosensors and using orthogonal pre-screens to reduce cheater cells during FACS.

The paper develops a computational method to identify enzyme promiscuity-induced metabolic network disruptions in engineered microbial hosts and evaluates its application in two case studies.

This study quantifies how cell surface charge and environmental factors affect the binding of pediocin PA-1 to microbial species, showing that charged non-target species reduce its potency in mixed communities.

The paper predicts new metabolites and reactions in E. coli using enzyme promiscuity and metabolomics data, enhancing the iML1515 metabolic model.

This paper introduces ProPASS, a workflow that links pathway synthesis with enzyme-host compatibility using solubility scores, and presents ProSol DB, a database of solubility scores for 240,016 enzymes in E. coli.