David Keating, Associate Scientist at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin presented a biology seminar talk on October 7 titled “Degradation of plant cell walls by bacteria: new insights.”
Microbial depolymerization of plant cell walls (lignocellulose) is a major contributor to global carbon balance, and a critical component of renewable energy. However, commercial exploitation of lignocellulose for bioenergy is limited, in part, by our incomplete mechanistic understanding of its depolymerization by microbes. The genomes of lignocellulose degrading microorganisms typically encode large and diverse groups of carbohydrate modifying enzymes with unassigned functions.
Dr. Keating discussed the use of systems biology approaches to assign function to predicted carbohydrate modifying enzymes in the lignocellulose-degrading bacterium Cellvibrio japonicus. The combined use of gene expression profiling, targeted gene disruption, and heterologous gene expression suggests that C. japonicus utilizes a combination of traditional glycosylhydrolases as well as novel oxidative cleavage mechanisms for the degradation of lignocellulose.