Metagenomic mining of novel/innovative commercial glycoenzymes

In biological science, metagenomics has revolutionised the process of drug discovery. This is because metagenomics serves as a tool for in depth characterisation by examining, sequencing, replicating and identifying the whole DNA/genome collected from any mixed population (Mahapatra et al., 2019). Metagenomics is used to study Carbohydrate Active Enzymes (CAZymes) containing microbial communities due to molecular-based culture-independent methods (Kunath et al., 2017). CAZymes are made of multiple domains; each domain serves as the key mediator for a specific function for the protein and structure. In the Carbohydrate-Active enZYmes (CAZy) database 20% of all protein domains are identified as domains of unknown function (DUFs). DUFs are mostly ignored due to not being the most abundant in many genomes. However, in a paper by Goodacre 2014, DUFs are shown to be essential and likely related to the organism survival function due to their relation to essential proteins(Goodacre et al., 2014). In the CAZy database multiple DUFs are associated with catalytic CAZyme domains, which could result in them having a similar function or increase their catalytic activity. We present DUFs that are considered to have the capability to help CAZymes break down polysaccharide chains and tools/methods we used to achieve these results.