Novel hydrogenases from deep-sea hydrothermal vents

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The project aims at identifying and characterizing novel hydrogen uptake enzymes (hydrogenases) from metagenomes of chemically distinct deep-sea hydrothermal vent systems. As deep-sea hydrothermal vent systems usually are characterized by elevated hydrogen concentrations and the primary biomass production depends on chemical energy, these environments provide a large potential for microbial hydrogen oxidizers. In the course of our previous DFG project we established an activity-based screen which enables us to identify recombinant hydrogen uptake active enzymes from metagenomic fosmid libraries. We already discovered six new hydrogen uptake active metagenomic clones. Their metagenomic fragments exhibited largely low (or no) sequence homologies to entries in the public databases. In the here described research project we propose to construct two new metagenomic fosmid libraries from hydrogen-rich hydrothermal habitats, screen the fosmid clones for hydrogen uptake activity, determine respective enzyme activity and identify the genes on the metagenomic fragments that encode enzymes responsible for the hydrogen uptake activity. The successful identification of novel hydrogenases and their accessory genes will expand our knowledge on the diversity and biochemical properties of hydrogenases and the genes and proteins involved in hydrogenase maturation and activation.