Proteomics Measurements of Functional Redundancy and Stability Testing of Cellulose Degrading Anaerobic Microbial Communities within Engineered Bioreactors
EMSL Project ID
44995
Abstract
An understanding of the role of functional redundancy within a microbial community is fundamental to predicting the stability associated with key services provided by that community. One provided service of importance is the biological degradation of cellulosic material. While life on earth depends on this service for the material flow of carbon, the underlying enzymatic activities are also of critical importance for the development of second generation biofuels production capabilities. Measuring the redundancy of enzymes involved in cellulosic degradation within a microbial community presents a challenge in that convergent evolution has produced many enzymes capable of glycosyl hydrolysis with dissimilar genomic sequence homology. This is contrasted to nitrogen fixation enzymes that exhibit a high degree of conserved genomic sequence homology. We focus on a solution to measuring redundancy of cellulosic enzymes through the development of bioinformatics tools as well as the development and application of chemical probes that bind irreversibly to the active site of these enzymes. Enrichment of the enzymes bound to these probes will allow the analysis of cellulose degrading microbial communities using a targeted mass spectrometry approach. Ultimately, the combined developments will be utilized to test the stability of crystalline cellulose degrading microbial communities with different initial amounts of functional redundancy.
Project Details
Start Date
2011-10-26
End Date
2013-12-04
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members
Related Publications
Boaro AA, YM Kim, A Konopka, SJ Callister, and BK Ahring. 2014. "Integrated ‘omics analysis for studying the microbial community response to a pH perturbation of a cellulose-degrading bioreactor culture." FEMS Microbiology Ecology 90(3):802-15. doi:10.1111/1574-6941.12435
Chauvigne-Hines LM, LN Anderson, HM Weaver, JN Brown, PK Koech, CD Nicora, BA Hofstad, RD Smith, MJ Wilkins, SJ Callister, and AT Wright. 2012. "Suite of Activity-Based Probes for Cellulose-Degrading Enzymes." Journal of the American Chemical Society 134(50):20521-20532. doi:10.1021/ja309790w