Lignocellulose Degradation in Bacteria and Fungi

Lignocellulose biomass is one of the most abundant resources for sustainable biofuels. However, scaling up the biomass-to-biofuels conversion process for widespread usage is still pending due to the high cost of enzymes and the labor-intensive need for substrate-dependent enzyme mixtures. Current research efforts are therefore targeted at searching for or engineering lignocellulolytic enzymes of high efficiency. Some microorganisms produce multi-enzyme complexes called cellulosomes for increased degradation efficiency up to 50-fold.

Here we examined the presence of cellulosomes in all bacterial and fungal species with protein sequences available. By using cellulosome proteins of one bacteria and one fungi as search queries, a sequence similarity search was performed in two databases: 1) the non-redundant database and 2) the EnsemblFungi database.