Commercially useful enzymes (CUEs) are
enzyme
Enzymes () are proteins that act as biological catalysts by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrate (chemistry), substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different molecule ...
s which have commercial uses.
Microbial
A microorganism, or microbe,, ''mikros'', "small") and ''organism'' from the el, ὀργανισμός, ''organismós'', "organism"). It is usually written as a single word but is sometimes hyphenated (''micro-organism''), especially in olde ...
enzymes have well-known applications as
biocatalysts in several areas of industry, such as
biotechnology
Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...
,
agriculture
Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled peop ...
,
pharmaceuticals
A medication (also called medicament, medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal drug or simply drug) is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. Drug therapy (pharmacotherapy) is an important part of the medical field and ...
, etc.
Metagenomic data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...
provide a unique resource for discovering novel commercially useful enzymes (CUEs) from yet unidentified microbes belonging to complex
microbial communities in diverse
ecosystem
An ecosystem (or ecological system) consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the syst ...
s.
Classification
A set of 510 CUEs was manually curated using publicly available information and classified into nine broad application categories based on their function. By comprehensive
homology-based mining of ten diverse publicly available metagenomic data sources, several novel CUEs, homologous to those in the set of known CUEs, were identified. Using this strategy, a comprehensive Metagenomic BioMining Engine (MetaBioME) platform to facilitate homology-based computational identification of homologs for known CUEs from metagenomic datasets is developed. This is a useful resource to identify novel homologs to the existing known CUEs and to also identify new ones, both of which can be used as leads for further experimental verification.
This is available at MetaBioME.
References
*
Enzymes
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