Paola Branduardi

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Biotechnology and Biosciences

Research on bioconversion based on insects is intensifying as it addresses the problem of reducing and reusing food and industrial waste. To reach this goal, we need to find more means of pairing waste to insects. With this goal, brewers' spent grains (BSG)-a food waste of the brewing industry-paired with the oleaginous biomass of the thraustochytr...

The industrial relevance of organic acids is high; because of their chemical properties, they can be used as building blocks as well as single-molecule agents with a huge annual market. Organic acid chemical platforms can derive from fossil sources by petrochemical refining processes, but most of them also represent natural metabolites produced by...

Background Omega-3 fatty acids (FAs) are relevant commodities in the market since their important role in human wellbeing. As the worldwide demand is increasing, alternative sources and sustainable processes are needed to face the limited supply of the omega-3 FAs of fish origin. Microalgae provide a portfolio of biodiversity able to satisfy the qu...

Evolution has provided a vast diversity of yeasts that play fundamental roles in nature and society. This diversity is not limited to genotypically homogenous species with natural interspecies hybrids and allodiploids that blur species boundaries frequently isolated. Thus, life-cycle and the nature of breeding systems have profound effects on genom...

Biomethane is a renewable product that can directly substitute its fossil counterpart, although its synthesis from residual biomasses has some hurdles. Because of the complex nature of both biomasses and the microbial consortia involved, innovative approaches such as mathematical modeling can be deployed to support possible improvements. The goal o...

Several compounds on the market derive from petrochemical synthesis, and carotenoids are no exception. Nonetheless, since their applications in the food, feed and cosmetic sectors, and because of sustainability issues, carotenoids of natural origin are desirable. Carotenoids can be extracted from several plants but also from carotenogenic microorga...

Using a circular economy concept, the present study investigated the use of crude glycerol, a primary by-product of biodiesel production, as a low-priced nutrient source for heterotrophic cultivation of the fungus-like protist Schizochytrium limacinum SR21 strain. The whole biomass of this oleaginous microorganism, rich in docosahexaenoic acid (DHA...

In the last decade, microbial-based biotechnological processes are paving the way toward sustainability as they implemented the use of renewable feedstocks. Nonetheless, the viability and competitiveness of these processes are often limited due to harsh conditions such as: the presence of feedstock-derived inhibitors including weak acids, non-unifo...

Biorefineries have a pivotal role in the bioeconomy scenario for the transition from fossil-based processes towards more sustainable ones relying on renewable resources. Lignocellulose is a prominent feedstock since its abundance and relatively low cost. Microorganisms are often protagonists of biorefineries, as they contribute both to the enzymati...

Background Petrochemical synthetic dominates several markets, and carotenoids are not an exception. Since their applications in the food, feed and cosmetic sectors, carotenoids of natural origin are increasingly requested, but the production needs to be sustainable also in terms of initial feedstock. For these reasons we deployed the carotenogenic...

In the context of the global need to move towards circular economies, microbial cell factories can be employed thanks to their ability to use side-stream biomasses from the agro-industrial sector to obtain additional products. The valorization of residues allows for better and complete use of natural resources and, at the same time, for the avoidan...

To achieve ambitious 21st-century goals and deal with high-level complexity, a bio-based economy is required to cross the boundaries of a single sector and integrate tools, language and knowledge drawn from different disciplines and sub-disciplines. The present contribution highlights how life scientists, social scientists, policymakers and industr...

The power of microorganisms in manipulating diverse matrices and in favouring the flux of elements and molecules through biogeochemical cycles developed in the natural environment, but they also managed to take advantage of some niches created by humans. Therefore, inspired by learning these lessons from nature, we can implement biobased processes...

Background Lipids from oleaginous yeasts emerged as a sustainable alternative to vegetable oils and animal fat to produce biodiesel, the biodegradable and environmentally friendly counterpart of petro-diesel fuel. To develop economically viable microbial processes, the use of residual feedstocks as growth and production substrates is required. Res...

Nowadays natural biopolymers have a wide variety of uses in various industrial applications, such as food, adhesives and composite materials. Among them, cellulose has attracted the interest of researchers due to its properties: high strength and flexibility, biocompatibility and nontoxicity. Despite that, in many cases its practical use is limited...

Background: As the circular economy advocates a near total waste reduction, the industry has shown an increased interest toward the exploitation of various residual biomasses. The origin and availability of biomass used as feedstock strongly affect the sustainability of biorefineries, where it is converted in energy and chemicals. Here, we explore...

Background: As the circular economy advocates a near total waste reduction, the industry has shown an increased interest towards the exploitation of various residual biomasses. The origin and availability of biomass used as feedstock strongly affects the sustainability of biorefineries, where it is converted in energy and chemicals. Here, we explor...

The development of personalized therapies represents an urgent need owing to the high rate of cancer recurrence and systemic toxicity of conventional drugs. So far, targeted toxins have shown promising results as potential therapeutic compounds. Specifically, toxins conjugated to antibodies or fused to growth factors/enzymes have been largely demon...

Background: Lipids from oleaginous yeasts emerged as sustainable alternative to vegetable oils and animal fat to produce biodiesel, the biodegradable and environmentally friendly counterpart of diesel fuel. To develop economically viable microbial processes, the use of residual feedstocks as growth substrates is required. Results: In this work, we...

Background: Lipids from oleaginous yeasts emerged as a sustainable alternative to vegetable oils and animal fat to produce biodiesel, the biodegradable and environmentally friendly counterpart of petro-diesel fuel. To develop economically viable microbial processes, the use of residual feedstocks as growth and production substrates is required. Res...

Background Lipids from oleaginous yeasts emerged as a sustainable alternative to vegetable oils and animal fat to produce biodiesel, the biodegradable and environmentally friendly counterpart of petro-diesel fuel. To develop economically viable microbial processes, the use of residual feedstocks as growth and production substrates is required. Resu...

Background: The sustainability of biorefineries is strongly related to the origin, the availability and the market of the biomass used as feedstock. Moreover, one of the pillars of circular economy aims at reducing waste, ideally to zero. These considerations well justify the increasing industrial interest in exploiting many and diverse residual bi...

Pab1, the major poly(A) binding protein of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is involved in many intracellular functions associated with mRNA metabolism, such as mRNA nuclear export, deadenylation, translation initiation and termination. Pab1 consists of four RNA recognition motifs (RRM), a proline‐rich domain (P) and a carboxy‐terminal (C) domai...

This study focused on the characterization of microbial communities during the desulfurization of ground tire rubber (GTR) by two bacterial strains i) Gordonia desulfuricans DSM 44462T, and ii) Rhodococcus sp. AF21875. Automated ribosomal inter-genic spacer analysis (ARISA), and high throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons were used to ana...

Doctoral training has changed in recent years with most PhDs now performed in structured programmes operated by university graduate schools. These schools generally superimpose a training framework onto the traditional research project to improve the education experience of the students and to prepare them for their careers. Many graduates progress...

Genome-scale metabolic models are powerful tools to understand and engineer cellular systems facilitating their use as cell factories. This is especially true for microorganisms with known genome sequences from which nearly complete sets of enzymes and metabolic pathways are determined, or can be inferred. Yeasts are highly diverse eukaryotes whose...

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is widely used as a cell factory for the biotechnological production of various industrial products. During these processes, yeasts meet different kinds of stressors that often cause oxidative stress and thus impair cell growth. Therefore, the development of robust strains is indispensable to improve production, y...

Stakeholders’ involvement and public engagement in research processes are essential elements to obtain concrete impacts in society. In this context we tested the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) strategy in the aquaculture industry to improve fish quality by using the most suitable feeds. These could be obtained through biotechnological ap...

Lactic acid has a wide range of applications starting from its undissociated form, and its production using cell factories requires stress-tolerant microbial hosts. The interspecies hybrid yeast Zygosaccharomyces parabailii has great potential to be exploited as a novel host for lactic acid production, due to high organic acid tolerance at low pH a...

The exploitation of petroleum as energy and material source opened unprecedented possibilities for the development of our human societies, but only now we realize that the use of fossil resources comes at devastatingly high environmental costs. Consequently, our efforts to tap other carbon sources are steadily increasing. Industrial microbiology ha...

The Saccharomyces cerevisiae poly(A)-binding protein Pab1 is a modular protein composed of four RNA recognition motifs (RRM), a proline-rich domain (P) and a C-terminus. Thanks to this modularity, Pab1 is involved in different interactions that regulate many aspects of mRNA metabolism, including the assembly of stress granules. In this work, we ana...

White-rot fungi are the main natural producers of lignin modifying enzymes, i.e. laccases and peroxidases, whose secretion and activity allows the depolymerization of lignin and the release of polysaccharides contained in lignocellulose. These enzymes are able to oxidize, in addition to lignin, a wide spectrum of natural and synthetic substrates, m...

Organic acids are broadly distributed in nature, and humans used them in their natural sources since the early ages, essentially for food and drink preparations. Organic acids are low-molecular-weight organic compounds with one or more acidic groups such as carboxyl, sulfonic, alcohol and thiol groups. These functional groups make organic acids key...

The production of natural aroma compounds is an expanding field within the branch of white biotechnology. Three aromatic compounds of interest are cinnamaldehyde, the typical cinnamon aroma that has applications in agriculture and medical sciences, as well as cinnamyl alcohol and hydrocinnamyl alcohol, which have applications in the cosmetic indust...

Zygosaccharomyces bailii is a non-Saccharomyces budding yeast known as one of the most aggressive food spoilage microorganism, often isolated as contaminant during wine fermentation, as well as from many acidic, high sugar and canned foods. The spoilage ability relies on the yeast's unique feature to tolerate the most common preservatives such as s...

Many interspecies hybrids have been discovered in yeasts, but most of these hybrids are asexual and can replicate only mitotically. Whole-genome duplication has been proposed as a mechanism by which interspecies hybrids can regain fertility, restoring their ability to perform meiosis and sporulate. Here, we show that this process occurred naturally...

Sequence alignment of the VPS1-MET14 intergenic regions from Z. rouxii and Z. parabailii. The Z. parabailii regions contain CEN4 and CEN11 whereas the Z. rouxii region is not a centromere. Putative CDE I and CDE III motifs are boxed. (TIF)

Homeolog pairs in which one gene is damaged and the other is intact, in ATCC60483. (XLSX)

PCR primer sequences used for MAT locus genotyping. (DOC)

Phylogenetic tree of internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions of rDNA. Chr4 and Chr11 are the ITS sequences from the chromosome 4 and 11 rDNA units in the Z. parabailii ATCC60483 genome. All other sequences are from Suh et al. [28] for strains of Z. parabailii(Zpar), Z. bailii(Zbai), and Z. pseudobailii (Zpse). Letters a-n are ITS variant designat...

Z. parabailii orthologs of S. cerevisiae genes involved in mating or meiosis. (XLSX)

Excel spreadsheet containing, in separate sheets, the underlying numerical data for Fig panels 2A, 2B and 2C. (XLSX)

Background The big challenge in any anti-tumor therapeutic approach is represented by the development of drugs selectively acting on the target with limited side effects, that exploit the unique characteristics of malignant cells. The urokinase (urokinase-type plasminogen activator, uPA) and its receptor uPAR have been identified as preferential ta...

The meeting “Microbial Stress: from Molecules to Systems” − the third in this series − was held in Sitges (Spain) in November 2015. The meeting offered the opportunity for international scientists to share their viewpoints and recent outcomes concerning microbial stress responses. Particular attention was given to the characterisation of mechanisms...

The ability of Zygosacchromyces bailii to grow at low pH and in the presence of considerable amounts of weak organic acids, lethal condition for Saccharomyces cerevisiae, increased the interest in the biotechnological potential of the yeast. To understand the mechanism of tolerance and growth effect of weak acids on Z. bailii, we evaluated the phys...

Background Microbial lipids can represent a valuable alternative feedstock for biodiesel production in the context of a viable bio-based economy. This production can be driven by cultivating some oleaginous microorganisms on crude-glycerol, a 10 % (w/w) by-product produced during the transesterification process from oils into biodiesel. Despite att...

The economic upturn of the past 200 years would not have been conceivable without fossil resources such as coal and oil. However, the fossil-based economy increasingly reaches its limits and displays contradictions. Bioeconomy, strategically combining economy and ecology willing to make biobased and sustainable growth possible, is promising to make...

Lactic acid is a versatile chemical platform with many different industrial applications. Yeasts have been demonstrated as attractive alternative to natural lactic acid producers since they can grow at low pH, allowing the direct purification of the product in the desired acidic form. However, when very high concentrations of organic acids are reac...

Industrial microbiology is proposing an increasing number of bio-based processes that are ready to move from the validation to the demonstration step, with the industrial world being more open to this opportunity for a change. The challenge is therefore to make such processes viable and competitive. When moving from the lab to the industrial scale,...

When exploited as cell factories, Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells are exposed to harsh environmental stresses impairing titer, yield and productivity of the fermentative processes. The development of robust strains therefore represents a pivotal challenge for the implementation of cost-effective bioprocesses. Altering master regulators of general ce...

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the most employed cell factories for the production of bioproducts. While monomeric hexose sugars constitute the preferential carbon source, this yeast can grow on a wide variety of nitrogen sources, which are catabolised through the Central Nitrogen Metabolism (CNM). To evaluate the effects of internal perturbati...

Microalgae are unicellular photo-and heterotrophic organisms that, being efficient producers of a rich and complex biomass, have attracted global interest as biofactories for the production of high-value compounds (e.g. PUFAs, proteins and pigments) that can find application in nutraceutical, pharmaceutical and food industries. Microalgae have also...

Background The great interest in the production of highly pure lactic acid enantiomers comes from the application of polylactic acid (PLA) for the production of biodegradable plastics. Yeasts can be considered as alternative cell factories to lactic acid bacteria for lactic acid production, despite not being natural producers, since they can better...

Development of robust yeast strains that can efficiently ferment lignocellulose-based feedstocks is one of the requirements for achieving economically feasible bioethanol production processes. With this goal, several genes have been identified as promising candidates to confer improved tolerance to S. cerevisiae. In most of the cases, however, the...

Microorganisms appear as ideal catalysts for chemical conversions. Diverse metabolic routes seem to open doors to the whole range of chemistry. Indeed, a vast amount of scientific papers suggesting new microbial cell factories for old and new products is published every year. However, only very few of them reached industrial relevance. Chemical bal...

Microorganisms offer a tremendous potential as cell factories, and they are indeed used by humans for centuries for biotransformations. Among them, yeasts combine the advantage of unicellular state with a eukaryotic organization, and, in the era of biorefineries, their biodiversity can offer solutions to specific process constraints. Zygosaccharomy...

The yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus features specific traits that render it attractive for industrial applications. These include production of ethanol which, together with thermotolerance and the ability to grow with a high specific growth rate on a wide range of substrates, could make it an alternative to Saccharomyces cerevisiae as an ethanol prod...

Yeasts play a significant role in biotechnology. They are important production hosts for chemicals, enzymes and biopharmaceutical ingredients. This chapter outlines our current knowledge about the interrelation of the central carbon metabolism and various microbial production processes. It is obvious that every production process is inevitably conn...

Oleaginous microorganisms, such as different yeast and algal species, can represent a sustainable alternative to plant oil for the production of biodiesel. They can accumulate fatty acids (FA) up to 70% of their dry weight with a predominance of (mono)unsaturated species, similarly to what plants do, but differently from animals. In addition, their...

In the context of the global objective of shifting from petroleum to a biomass-based economy, the research on fermentative strategies to produce alternative biofuels and chemicals has become a predominant field of study. Microorganisms, because of their substrate versatility and metabolic efficiency, are promising to partially support our increasin...

Biotechnological processes are of increasing significance for industrial production of fine and bulk chemicals, including biofuels. Unfortunately, under operative conditions microorganisms meet multiple stresses such as non-optimal pH, temperature, oxygenation and osmotic stress. Moreover, they have to face inhibitory compounds released during the...

Background The sustainable production of biofuels remains one of the major issues of the upcoming years. Among the number of most desirable molecules to be produced, butanol and isobutanol deserve a prominent place. They have superior liquid-fuel features in respect to ethanol. Particularly, butanol has similar properties to gasoline and thus it ha...