[ged] paper for next week

[guojiaro at gmail.com]

Metagenomic Discovery of Biomass-Degrading Genes and Genomes from Cow Rumen


The paucity of enzymes that efficiently deconstruct plant polysaccharides  
represents a major bottleneck for industrial-scale conversion of cellulosic  
biomass into biofuels. Cow rumen microbes specialize in degradation of  
cellulosic plant material, but most members of this complex community  
resist cultivation. To characterize biomass-degrading genes and genomes, we  
sequenced and analyzed 268 gigabases of metagenomic DNA from microbes  
adherent to plant fiber incubated in cow rumen. From these data, we  
identified 27,755 putative carbohydrate-active genes and expressed 90  
candidate proteins, of which 57% were enzymatically active against  
cellulosic substrates. We also assembled 15 uncultured microbial genomes,  
which were validated by complementary methods including single-cell genome  
sequencing. These data sets provide a substantially expanded catalog of  
genes and genomes participating in the deconstruction of cellulosic biomass.


http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6016/463.short
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.idyll.org/pipermail/ged-jclub/attachments/20110212/be26f822/attachment.html>