[metagenomics-jclub] Journal Club, Wed, Feb 2, PSB 271

[Adina Chuang Howe]

Bjorn Ostman will be presenting his research, "Evolutionary
metagenomics: response of soil bacteria to agriculture."

Also to note, JGI's rumen study based on Illumina deep sequencing is out.

See you next week!
Adina
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http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6016/463.short

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.