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

复合碳水化合物的酶促合成和降解可以说是自然界中最重要的生物催化过程之一：主要由多糖组成的植物和藻类细胞壁构成了全球碳循环(约2000亿吨)中的一个巨大的储存库，每年陆地净初级生产力贡献了300-600亿吨的生物量。碳水化合物活性酶和它们的同源底物也是各种医学重要过程的中心，包括糖生物学识别事件、内源性糖蛋白和脂代谢以及微生物感染。尤其是，多糖降解酶对人类和我们赖以生存的动物的营养都是必不可少的。这项研究计划的愿景是提供对碳水化合物活性酶结构-功能关系的基本见解，这些酶负责生物质多糖的组装、重排和降解。将使用最先进的生物信息学和新的化学探针来挖掘植物、腐生微生物和互惠细菌的基因组、元基因组和蛋白质组，以确定详细酶学特征的新靶点，包括协作酶结构功能分析和功能基因组学。该计划将阐明碳水化合物活性酶系统的生物学作用，提供前瞻性的HQP培训，并向后续的白色生物技术应用提供与加拿大现有和新兴行业直接相关的信息。

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.