Discovery, characterization, and application of carbohydrate-active enzymes from diverse biological niches

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The enzymatic synthesis and degradation of complex carbohydrates arguably ranks as one of the most important biocatalytic processes in Nature: Plant and algal cell walls, which are predominantly comprised of polysaccharides, constitute an enormous reservoir in the global carbon cycle (ca. 2000 gigatonnes), with terrestrial net primary production contributing 30-60 gigatonnes of biomass annually. Carbohydrate-active enzymes and their cognate substrates are also central to diverse processes of medical importance, including glycobiological recognition events, endogenous glyco-protein and -lipid turnover, and microbial infection. Not least, polysaccharide-degrading enzyme are essential to the nutrition of both humans and those animals on which we depend for sustenance.The vision of this research program is to provide fundamental insight into structure-function relationships of carbohydrate-active enzymes responsible for the assembly, rearrangement, and degradation of biomass polysaccharides. Genomes, meta-genomes, and proteomes of plants, saprophytic microorganisms, and mutualistic bacteria will be mined using state-of-the-art bioinformatics and new chemical probes to identify novel targets for detailed enzymological characterisation, including collaborative enzyme structure-function analysis and functional genomics. This program will illuminate the biological roles of carbohydrate-active enzyme systems, provide forward-looking HQP training, and inform subsequent white biotechnological applications of direct relevance to established and emerging Canadian industries.