Halophilic Communities as a Source for Novel Lignocellulolytic Enzymes

The goal of my project has been to identify microbes and enzymes tolerant of varying levels of salinity. The driving hypothesis for this work is that salt tolerance correlates with ionic liquid tolerance. Ionic liquids are presently the best means of pretreating lignocellulosic biomass to better enable its biological conversion into useful products at biorefineries. Ionic liquid tolerance enzymes and microbes with help consolidate the various steps in the production of biofuels and reduce the impact of residual ionic liquids in feedstock materials, thereby reducing processing costs. We have collected samples from Puerto Rico and the San Francisco Bay in California from environments representing a gradient of salinities. Both sediment-associated and planctonic microbial community samples were collected and enrichments have been prepared from some of the samples. Each of the environments samples are also of great interest to the broader environmental microbiology scientific community including planctonic samples from the Bioluminescent Bay near La Parguera, PR and sediment samples from Thalassia testudinum beds near the bay.