title: Discovery and characterization of heme enzymes from unsequenced bacteria: application to microbial lignin degradation.
abstract: Bacteria and other living organisms offer a potentially unlimited resource for the discovery of new chemical catalysts, but many interesting reaction phenotypes observed at the whole organism level remain difficult to elucidate down to the molecular level. A key challenge in the discovery process is the identification of discrete molecular players involved in complex biological transformations because multiple cryptic genetic components often work in concert to elicit an overall chemical phenotype. We now report a rapid pipeline for the discovery of new enzymes of interest from unsequenced bacterial hosts based on laboratory-scale methods for the de novo assembly of bacterial genome sequences using short reads. We have applied this approach to the biomass-degrading soil bacterium  Amycolatopsis  sp. 75iv2 ATCC 39116 (formerly  Streptomyces setonii  and  S. griseus  75vi2) to discover and biochemically characterize two new heme proteins comprising the most abundant members of the extracellular oxidative system under lignin-reactive growth conditions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-1460, United States.
authors.forename: Margaret E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: Mark C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Walker
authors.forename: Toshiki G
authors.initials: TG
authors.lastname: Nakashige
authors.forename: Anthony T
authors.initials: AT
authors.lastname: Iavarone
authors.forename: Michelle C Y
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Chang
mesh_terms: D000192:Actinomycetales / Q000201:enzymology* / Q000254:growth & development / Q000378:metabolism; D018533:Biomass; D008031:Lignin / Q000737:chemistry / Q000378:metabolism*; D015394:Molecular Structure; D009195:Peroxidase / Q000378:metabolism*
chemical_list: D008031:Lignin; D009195:Peroxidase