July 25, 2013 — One of the keys to commercialization of advanced biofuels is the development of cost-competitive ways to extract fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass. The use of enzymes from thermophiles -- microbes that thrive at extremely high temperatures and alkaline conditions -- holds promise for achieving this. Finding the most effective of these microbial enzymes, however, has been a challenge.
sThat challenge has now been met by a collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).
Working with a compost-derived consortium of thermophillic bacterium adapted to grow on switchgrass, a leading potential fuel crop, and using a combination of metagenomic and metaproteomic technologies, the collaboration has identified individual microbial species whose enzymes were the most active in deconstructing the switchgrass biomass. Major institutes in addition to JBEI participating in this collaboration included DOE's Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
"This marks the first time that the functional roles of individual microbial populations within a consortium have been linked with specific enzyme activities, in this case cellulase and hemicellulase," says Steven Singer, director of JBEI's microbial communities program. "Since these activities are broadly relevant to biofuel production, this is one of the first real-world applications being met by combining metagenomics and metaproteomics."
Singer, who is also a research scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)'s Earth Sciences Division, is the senior author of a paper describing this research in the journal PLOS One titled "Proteogenomic Analysis of a Thermophilic Bacterial Consortium Adapted to Deconstruct Switchgrass." Co-authors are Patrik D'haeseleer, John Gladden, Martin Allgaier, Patrik Chain, Susannah Tringe, Stephanie Malfatti, Joshua Aldrich, Carrie Nicora, Errol Robinson, Ljiljana Paša-Toli
sThat challenge has now been met by a collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).
Working with a compost-derived consortium of thermophillic bacterium adapted to grow on switchgrass, a leading potential fuel crop, and using a combination of metagenomic and metaproteomic technologies, the collaboration has identified individual microbial species whose enzymes were the most active in deconstructing the switchgrass biomass. Major institutes in addition to JBEI participating in this collaboration included DOE's Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
"This marks the first time that the functional roles of individual microbial populations within a consortium have been linked with specific enzyme activities, in this case cellulase and hemicellulase," says Steven Singer, director of JBEI's microbial communities program. "Since these activities are broadly relevant to biofuel production, this is one of the first real-world applications being met by combining metagenomics and metaproteomics."
Singer, who is also a research scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)'s Earth Sciences Division, is the senior author of a paper describing this research in the journal PLOS One titled "Proteogenomic Analysis of a Thermophilic Bacterial Consortium Adapted to Deconstruct Switchgrass." Co-authors are Patrik D'haeseleer, John Gladden, Martin Allgaier, Patrik Chain, Susannah Tringe, Stephanie Malfatti, Joshua Aldrich, Carrie Nicora, Errol Robinson, Ljiljana Paša-Toli