Zhi-Yan Du

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa | UH Manoa · Department of Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering

Microalgae are promising sources of valuable bioproducts such as biofuels, food, and nutraceuticals. However, harvesting microalgae is challenging due to their small size and low biomass concentrations. To address this challenge, bio-flocculation of starchless mutants of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (sta6/sta7) was investigated with Mortierella alpina...

Microalgae have been considered a promising and sustainable candidate for wastewater treatment and valuable bioproducts, such as feedstocks for food, nutrients, and energy. However, many challenging bottlenecks, such as low biomass productivity, expensive biomass harvesting techniques, and inefficient extraction of biofuels restrict its large-scale...

Lipids are not only the building blocks of cellular membranes, but also play fundamental roles in photosynthesis, protection, environmental and cellular communication, and energy storage. Lipid metabolism is a dynamic and complicated process that includes lipid biosynthesis, transport, accumulation, turnover, and excretion, acting to regulate plant...

Phenolic acids comprise the major bioactive compounds in Salvia miltiorrhiza, which can be increased by abscisic acid (ABA) elicitation. However, the underlying regulation mechanism is poorly understood. Here, the ABA-induced transcriptome revealed that bZIP2 was significantly induced, which expressed highly in roots. Bioinformatic analysis reveale...

Phenolic acids rank high among the major active metabolites produced in the Chinese herb, Salvia miltiorrhiza, which has a rapidly escalating medicinal demand. Phenolic acid biosynthesis can be induced by methyl jasmonate (MeJA), although the underlying molecular mechanism remains obscure. A jasmonic acid-responsive basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) tr...

Increased salinity, as consequence of the ongoing climate change, has a significant impact on crop production worldwide. The overexpression of rice ACYL-COA-BINDING PROTEIN4 (OsACBP4) protects transgenic rice and Arabidopsis from salinity stress, while OsACBP4-RNAi lines were more susceptible than the vector control (VC) and wild type (WT). The ove...

Backgrounds Acyl-coenzyme A (CoA) esters are important intermediates in lipid metabolism with regulatory properties. Acyl-CoA-binding proteins bind and transport acyl-CoAs to fulfill these functions. RICE ACYL-COA-BINDING PROTEIN6 (OsACBP6) is currently the only one peroxisome-localized plant ACBP that has been proposed to be involved in β-oxidatio...

Acyl-CoA-binding proteins (ACBP) bind to long-chain acyl-CoA esters and phospholipids, enhancing the activity of different acyltransferases in animals and plants. Nevertheless, the role of these proteins in the synthesis of triacylglycerols (TAGs) remains unclear. Here, we cloned a cDNA encoding HaACBP1, a Class II ACBP from sunflower (Helianthus a...

Microalgae are promising biological factories for diverse natural products. Microalgae tout high productivity, and their biomass has value in industrial products ranging from biofuels, feedstocks, food additives, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and as alternatives to synthetic or animal‐derived products. However, harvesting microalgae to extract biopro...

Oleaginous fungi are capable of accumulating 20%–80% of their dry biomass into lipids, also known as microbial lipids or single cell oils (SCOs). Microbial lipids from oleaginous fungi have attracted more attention in recent years, due to their broad potential in biotechnological applications. Due to the diminishing conventional fossil fuel reserve...

The marine microalgae Nannochloropsis oceanica (CCMP1779) is a prolific producer of oil and is considered a viable and sustainable resource for biofuel feedstocks. Nitrogen (N) availability has a strong impact on the physiological status and metabolism of microalgal cells, but the exact nature of this response is poorly understood. To fill this gap...

Mutualistic interactions between free-living algae and fungi are widespread in nature and are hypothesized to have facilitated the evolution of land plants and lichens. In all known algal-fungal mutualisms, including lichens, algal cells remain external to fungal cells. Here, we report on an algal–fungal interaction in which Nannochloropsis oceanic...

Mutualistic interactions between free-living algae and fungi are widespread in nature and are hypothesized to have facilitated the evolution of land plants and lichens. In all known algal-fungal mutualisms, including lichens, algal cells remain external to fungal cells. Here, we report on an algal-fungal interaction in which Nannochloropsis oceanic...

Temperature effects on the fatty acid (FA) profiles of phytoplankton, major primary producers in the ocean, have been widely studied due to their importance as industrial feedstocks and to their indispensable role as global producers of long‐chain, polyunsaturated FA (PUFA), including omega‐3 (ω3) FA required by organisms at higher trophic levels....

Arabidopsis ACYL-COENZYME-A-BINDING PROTEIN1 (ACBP1) plays a positive role in abscisic acid (ABA) signaling during seed dormancy and germination. As a putative component of the ABA signaling pathway, its potential role in salt and osmotic signaling was tested using ACBP1pro::GUS transgenic lines, ACBP1-overexpressors (ACBP1-OXs), the acbp1 mutant a...

Background Although microalgal biofuels have potential advantages over conventional fossil fuels, high production costs limit their application in the market. We developed bio-flocculation and incubation methods for the marine alga, Nannochloropsis oceanica CCMP1779, and the oleaginous fungus, Mortierella elongata AG77, resulting in increased oil p...

Photosynthesis occurs in the thylakoid membrane, where the predominant lipid is monogalactosyldiacylglycerol (MGDG). As environmental conditions change, photosynthetic membranes have to adjust. In this study, we used a loss-of-function Chlamydomonas reinhardtii mutant deficient in the MGDG-specific lipase PGD1 (PLASTID GALACTOGLYCEROLIPID DEGRADATI...

Endosymbiosis of bacteria by eukaryotes is a defining feature of cellular evolution. In addition to well known bacterial origins for mitochondria and chloroplasts, multiple origins of bacterial endosymbiosis are known within the cells of diverse animals, plants, and fungi. Early-diverging lineages of terrestrial fungi harbor endosymbiotic bacteria...

Abstract Background: Photosynthetic microalgae are considered a viable and sustainable resource for biofuel feedstocks, because they can produce higher biomass per land area than plants and can be grown on non-arable land. Among many microalgae considered for biofuel production, Nannochloropsis oceanica (CCMP1779) is particularly promising, because...

Background: Photosynthetic microalgae are considered a viable and sustainable resource for biofuel feedstocks, because they can produce higher biomass per land area than plants and can be grown on non-arable land. Among many microalgae considered for biofuel production, Nannochloropsis oceanica (CCMP1779) is particularly promising, because followi...

Acyl-CoA-binding protein (ACBP) was first identified in mammals as a neuropeptide, and was demonstrated to belong to an important house-keeping protein family that extends across eukaryotes and some prokaryotes. In plants, the Arabidopsis ACBP family consists of six AtACBPs (AtACBP1 to AtACBP6), and has been investigated using gene knock-out mutant...

Plant and algal oils are some of the most energy-dense renewable compounds provided by nature. Triacylglycerols (TAGs) are the major constituent of plant oils, which can be converted into fatty acid methyl esters commonly known as biodiesel. As one of the most efficient producers of TAGs, photosynthetic microalgae have attracted substantial interes...

Acyl-CoA-binding proteins (ACBPs) bind to acyl-CoA esters and promote their interaction with other proteins, lipids and cell structures. Small class I ACBPs have been identified in different plants, such as Arabidopsis thaliana (AtACBP6), Brassica napus (BnACBP) and Oryza sativa (OsACBP1, OsACBP2, OsACBP3), and they are capable of binding to differ...

Significance The hexahistidine-Ni ²⁺ -NTA system is used extensively in protein purification, and large numbers of His-tagged protein libraries exist worldwide. The application of this tagging system to image proteins in live cells would offer significant opportunities to track cellular events with minimal spatial and functional perturbation on a p...

In Arabidopsis thaliana, the expression of two genes encoding acyl-CoA-binding proteins (ACBPs) AtACBP1 and AtACBP4, were observed to be induced by lead [Pb(II)] in shoots and roots in quantitative real time PCR (qRT-PCR) analyses. Quantitative GUS (β-glucuronidase) activity assays confirmed Pb(II) induction of AtACBP1pro::GUS and electrophoretic m...

Protein-protein interactions are at the core of cellular interactomics and are essential for various biological functions. Since proteins commonly function as macromolecular complexes, it is important to identify their interacting partners to better understand their function and the significance in these interactions. The acyl-CoA-binding proteins...

A family of six genes encoding acyl-CoA-binding proteins (ACBPs), ACBP1-ACBP6, has been characterized in Arabidopsis thaliana. In this study, we demonstrate that ACBP1 promotes abscisic acid (ABA) signaling during germination and seedling development. ACBP1 was induced by ABA, and transgenic Arabidopsis ACBP1-over-expressors showed increased sensit...

Abiotic stresses present major challenges in sustaining crop yield. They trigger responses involving molecular mechanisms for cellular adjustments, including signal perception and transduction cascades, transcriptional networks and adaptive metabolic pathways. The past decade has witnessed the completion of genome projects of several model plant sp...

Arabidopsis thaliana acyl-CoA-binding protein 2 (ACBP2) is a stress-responsive protein that is also important in embryogenesis. Here, we assign a role for ACBP2 in abscisic acid (ABA) signalling during seed germination, seedling development and the drought response. ACBP2 was induced by ABA and drought, and transgenic Arabidopsis overexpressing ACB...

In our recent paper in Plant Physiology, we reported that recombinant Arabidopsis thaliana acyl-CoA-binding protein ACBP1 binds phosphatidic acid (PA) in vitro and acbp1 mutant plants are conferred freezing tolerance. ACBP1-overexpressors were freezing sensitive and accumulated more PA, in contrast to acbp1 mutants which had reduced PA and elevated...

In Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), a family of six genes encodes acyl-coenzyme A-binding proteins (ACBPs). A member of this family, ACBP1, contains an amino-terminal transmembrane domain that targets it to the plasma membrane and the endoplasmic reticulum. To investigate ACBP1 function, ACBP1-overexpressing transgenic Arabidopsis plants were ch...

We isolated and characterized two CYC-like genes from Oreocharis benthamii Clark (Gesneriaceae) in order to investigate their expression patterns. Phylogenetic analysis demonstrates that the two CYC-like genes, ObCYC1 and ObCYC2, belong to GCYC1 and GCYC2 clades in Gesneriaceae, respectively. Gene-specific RT-PCR results show that they have differe...