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Mikel Lavilla-Puerta

@mikellavi.bsky.social

148 followers 154 following 26 posts

Oxygen, yeast, SynBio and sometimes, plants. Postdoc at Oxford Biology, PhD at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. I also sing and am very fond of my village.

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Mikel Lavilla-Puerta @mikellavi.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Big thanks to everyone involved! @yuminghe.bsky.social @beagiuntoli.bsky.social @syno2xis.bsky.social et al.! Several years in the making and a lot of people met, but finally out as a preprint!

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Mikel Lavilla-Puerta @mikellavi.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

3] The role of hypoxia-inducible PCOs: why make more of an enzyme in hypoxia, where it has negligible activity..? Well, they actually do something! And they may be the key to engineer faster hypoxic responses

The synthetic circuit, plus a hypoxia-inducible feedback loop with PCO1 and a copy of RAP. Parameter analysis shows that PCO's features (affinity for oxygen, RAP, etc.) Dictate how fast responses are!

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Mikel Lavilla-Puerta @mikellavi.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Thanks to this yeast system we understood: 1] The Cys-NDP is responsible for these responses in plants happening in only 5-10min. 2] HRPE elements (in hypoxic promoters) compete for ERFVII TFs when these are limited. The more HRPEs, the faster the response!

The synthetic circuit is fast! 5 min in, hypoxia is already activating the reporter output!

Responses in plants aren't slower! And how fast they are has actually a lot to do with how many HRPEs they have in their promoters

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Mikel Lavilla-Puerta @mikellavi.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

The Cys N-Degron Pathway (which controls plant responses to hypoxia) works in coordination with many, many other processes that finely tune low O2 responses. We took it. Put it in yeast, where no such regulation exists. And it still works! So the Cys-NDP is self-sufficient...

Growth controlled by the synthetic circuit: PCOs and oxygen slow yeast down!

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