engleski

Amyloenzymes captured by targeted Metagenomics

AMYLOMICS is an acronym for the European project "AMYLOenzymes" captured by targeted metagenOMICS that is funded by EU in the 7th framework program. The aim is to develop new, robust enzymes for the starch and carbohydrate industries. The enzymes should enable the formation of new primary products, such as oligosaccharides of defined sizes, composition and degree of branching, new types of linkages, cyclic or more complex polysaccharides, increased digestive resistance, and secondary sugar derivatives such as substituted starches and polyols. Fundamental to the success of the project will be the development of an efficient platform technology for enzyme screening based on Targeted Metagenomics, which comprises: microbial enrichment techniques, massive parallel 454 sequencing and microarray based sequence capture. The starch and the carbohydrate industries depend greatly on biocatalytic processes in modifying and fractionating polysaccharides and its derived components for the production of industrial and consumer products. There is a constant need for a range of robust enzymes that can be used for the synthesis, fractionation and/or modification of carbohydrates. There is also a need for economical alternatives to the existing tools and techniques, both for the production of novel higher value products and for the optimization and improvement of older processes. A special focus will be on harvesting new carbohydrate modifying genes/enzymes from metagenome libraries obtained from environments extreme in more than one aspect, i.e. thermo-acidophilic and thermo-alkalophilic biotopes. There is usually an advantage of using moderate to high temperatures (60-100°C) in industrial catalytic processes for lowering the viscosity of polysaccharides and increasing enzymatic access. Furthermore, enzymes adapted to these environments are not only thermostable but also often resistant to proteases, organic solvents and extremes of pH. Exploitation of high-throughput sequence data of metagenomes has been hampered by the high yield of short length DNA reads with limited informative content. AMYLOMICS addresses this problem by developing a gene retrieval platform based on massive parallel sequencing and microarray sequence capture techniques. These methodologies combined in the project enable “genome walking” of complex environmental DNA. Consequently, this greatly facilitates the access to the largely unexplored wealth of genes in the environment and greatly improves upon current technologies. The Metagenomic mining platform that will be developed in this project efficiently circumvents the need for labour intensive cloning, construction of large insert gene-libraries and subsequent functional screening. It also evades the limitation of sequence based PCR methods.

AMYLOMICS; thermo-alkalophilic biotopes; high-throughput sequence data; metagenomes; starch degrading enzymes; carbohydrate industries

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