Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology

Renato de Souza Pinto Lemgruber

PhD Student
Marcellin Group

Waste to chemicals: metabolism of Clostridium autoethanogenum and PHB production from syngas fermentation

Renato de Souza Pinto Lemgruber is doing PhD studies on using an integrated systems biology approach (e.g. transcriptomics, metabolomics, and genome-scale metabolic modeling) to understand the energetics and redox metabolism of Clostridium autoethanogenum and expand its product spectrum into the bioplastic PHB from gas fermentation.

Renato Lemgruber graduated in Biology from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR, Curitiba - Brazil) in 2009, where he developed undergraduate studies in the laboratory of Biological Nitrogen Fixation (NFB), studying the proteome of the nitrogen-fixing bacterium, Herbaspirillum seropedicae.

Renato received his master degree in Genetics, Conservation and Evolutionary Biology from the (Brazilian) National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA, Manaus - Brazil) in 2012, where he studied the differential gene expression in discus fish (Symphysodon aequifasciatus) exposed to petroleum derivatives.

Key Publications

  1. Lemgruber R, Marshall NAA, Ghelfi A, Fagundes DB, Val AL (2013) Functional Categorization of Transcriptome in the Species Symphysodon aequifasciatus Pellegrin 1904 (Perciformes: Cichlidae) Exposed to Benzo[a]pyrene and Phenanthrene. PLoS ONE 8(12): e81083. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081083.
  2. Huergo LF, Noindorf L, Gimenes C, Lemgruber R, Cordellini DF, Falarz LJ, Cruz LM, Monteiro RA, Pedrosa FO, Chubatsu LS, Souza EM and Steffens MBR (2010) Proteomic analysis of Herbaspirillum seropedicae reveals ammonium-induced AmtB-dependent membrane sequestration of PII proteins. FEMS Microbiology Letters. 308(1), July 2010, pp. 40–47.
  3. Valgepea K, Lemgruber RSP, Meaghan K, Palfreyman RW, Abdalla T, Heijstra B, Behrendorff JB, Tappel R, Köpke M, Simpson SD, Nielsen LK, Marcellin E. Maintenance of ATP homeostasis triggers metabolic shifts in gas-fermenting acetogens. Cell Systems. 2017 May 24;4(5):505-515.e5
  4. Kaspar Valgepea, Kim Q Loi, James B Behrendorff, Renato de S P Lemgruber, Manuel Plan, Mark P Hodson, Michael Köpke, Lars K Nielsen, Esteban Marcellin. Arginine Deiminase Pathway Provides ATP and Boosts Growth of the Gas-Fermenting Acetogen Clostridium autoethanogenum. Metabolic Engineering, v. 41, p. 202-211, 2017