The paper identifies genetic and environmental factors influencing multicellular-like phenotypes in fission yeast through experimental and genomic analyses.

Genetics · Mar 6, 2026Peer-reviewedGenetics

The Role of Metabolism in Shaping Enzyme Structures Over 400 Million Years of Evolution

Oliver Lemke, Benjamin Murray Heineike, Sandra Viknander, Nir Cohen, Feiran Li, Jacob Lucas Steenwyk, Leonard Spranger, Federica Agostini, Cory Thomas Lee, Simran Kaur Aulakh, Judith G. Berman, Antonis Rokas, Jens Nielsen, Toni Ingolf Gossmann, Aleksej Zelezniak, Markus Ralser

This study uses AlphaFold2 to analyze how metabolism influenced enzyme structural evolution across 400 million years by examining 11,269 enzyme structures and their metabolic reactions.

Nature · Jul 9, 2025Peer-reviewedSystems Biology

Inorganic sulfur fixation via a new homocysteine synthase allows yeast cells to cooperatively compensate for methionine auxotrophy

Jason Yu, Benjamin Murray Heineike, Johannes Hartl, Clara Correia‐Melo, Simran Kaur Aulakh, Andrea D. Lehmann, Oliver Lemke, Federica Agostini, Cory T. Lee, Vadim Demichev, Christoph B. Messner, Michael Mülleder, Markus Ralser

The paper shows yeast cells can cooperatively compensate for methionine auxotrophy by using a new homocysteine synthase, HSU1, to re-assimilate hydrogen sulfide.

PLoS Biology · Dec 1, 2022Peer-reviewedMolecular Biology

Controlling CRISPR-Cas9 with ligand-activated and ligand-deactivated sgRNAs

Kale Kundert, James E. Lucas, Kyle E. Watters, Christof Fellmann, Andrew H. Ng, Benjamin Murray Heineike, Christina M. Fitzsimmons, Benjamin L. Oakes, Jiuxin Qu, Neha K. Prasad, Oren S. Rosenberg, David F. Savage, Hana El‐Samad, Jennifer A. Doudna, Tanja Kortemme

Inserting theophylline aptamers into the sgRNA yields ligand-activated and ligand-deactivated guides that tune CRISPRi in E. coli over 11x to 13x dynamic ranges, enabling two-ligand multiplexing.

Nature Communications · May 9, 2019Peer-reviewedSynthetic Biology✦ In-depth digest