Mining anaerobic digester consortia metagenomes for secreted carbohydrate active enzymes

Anaerobic digesters (ADs) are one of several ways to produce renewable energy, which in the case of ADs is in the form of methane. Several microbial groups are involved in anaerobic degradation of organic wastes such as animal manures and wastewater, and solid organic wastes such as sludge, crop, and food wastes (Alvarado et al., 2014).
The processes and the roles of the microorganisms that are involved in biomass conversion and methane production in ADs are still not fully understood. We are investigating thermophilic and mesophilic ADs that use wastewater surplus sludge for methane production. To gain insight into both the degradation of the carbohydrates and the various roles of the microbes in the ADs we have mined metagenomes from both types of ADs for glycoside hydrolases, carbohydrate esterases, polysaccharide lyases, auxiliary activities, and carbohydrate binding modules. The mining was done with the Peptide Pattern Recognition (PPR) program (Busk and Lange, 2013), which is a novel non-alignment based approach that can predict function of e.g. CAZymes. PPR identifies a set of short conserved sequences, which can be used as a finger print when mining genomes for novel enzymes.
In both thermophilic and mesophilic ADs a wide variety of carbohydrate active enzyme functions were discovered in the metagenomic sequencing of the microbial consortia. The most dominating type of glycoside hydrolases were β-glucosidases (up to 27%), α-amylases (up to 10%), α-glucosidases (up to 8%), α-galactosidases (up to 9%) and β-galactosidases (up to 7%). For carbohydrate esterases the by far most dominating type was acetylxylan esterases (up to 59%) followed by feruloyl esterases (up to 16%). Less than 15 polysaccharide lyases were identified in the different metagenomes and not surprisingly no polysaccharide monooxygenases were identifed. For the carbohydrate binding modules one of the most dominating families were CBM48 (up to 16%).