Journal Article
Science, vol. 351, iss. 6278, pp. 1192-1195, 2016
Authors
Kevin V. Solomon, Charles H. Haitjema, John K. Henske, Sean P. Gilmore, Diego Borges-Rivera, Anna Lipzen, Heather M. Brewer, Samuel O. Purvine, Aaron T. Wright, Michael K. Theodorou, Igor V. Grigoriev, Aviv Regev, Dawn A. Thompson, Michelle A. O’Malley
Abstract
Mining gut fungi to break down biomass
The recalcitrance of plant biomass remains a formidable bottleneck in the production of biofuels and other chemicals from renewable sources. Enzymes from microbial communities found within ruminants and hindgut fermenters, however, show considerable promise to break down plant material into simple sugars efficiently. Solomon
et al.
used 'omics-level and biochemical assays to reveal a suite of lignocellulose-degrading enzymes from early-diverging anaerobic fungi isolated from the guts of horses, goats, and sheep. This approach not only reveals the regulation of these pathways but also represents a method to identify enzymes with no known homologs that would be unidentifiable using conventional screening methods.
Science
, this issue p.
1192
