MetXtra - An Integrated High-Throughput Metagenomics Platform for Enzyme Discovery

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Only a tiny fraction (~1%) of all microorganisms can currently be grown in the laboratory and hence have theirDNA sequenced. Thus, there is a huge wealth of genetic sequence data still to be discovered fromenvironmental samples of the remaining 99% of uncultured microorganisms. The field of metagenomicsdirectly samples microorganisms living in the environment, thereby avoiding the need for laboratory culturingbefore DNA sequencing. Metagenomics projects can yield very large amounts of DNA sequence data and themajor bottleneck to exploiting this data for enzyme discovery is the actual data analysis. The objective of thisproject between Biocatalysts Ltd and EMBL-EBI is to develop a novel and unique data analysis softwareplatform, MetXtra, for the rapid and efficient identification of completely novel enzymes for IndustrialBiotechnology (IB) applications from large metagenomic DNA sequence libraries.