ena-STUDY-UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL-23-12-2020-11:51:04:766-191
Frozen soil to explore cold-adapted microbial trends and enzymes
Permafrost represents a reservoir for the bioprospecting of new compounds and cold-adapted proteins. Cold-adapted proteins are advantageous in several industrial settings because, thanks to their low enzymatic optimum temperature, they do no require heating steps, being more energy sustainable and giving high reaction yields and fewer unwanted secondary chemical reactions. Comparison between thermophilic, mesophilic and psychrophilic proteins can give important information for the bioengineering optimization of cold-adapted proteins. We collected frozen soil samples from 34 different locations along a transect starting at the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) edge and going further away ranging a variety of habitats and geochemical specific site conditions with the aim to obtain a deep read coverage assembly i) to analyze the cold-adapted community in this area, studying the DNA and cDNA microbial distribution in proglacial upper permafrost layer, ii) and to reconstruct high- and medium- quality Metagenome-Assembled Genomes (MAGs) and create a Cold-Adapted Predicted Protein (CAPP) database. The cold-adapted community converged to similar taxonomic composition along the transect and showed solid permafrost-shaped community rather than microbial trends of typical of proglacial systems. However, whereas DNA profiles were conditioned by the distance from the ice edge, cDNA showed major correlation to geochemical trends highlighting how microbial activity is determined by environmental conditions. The construction of the assembly of this conserved frozen soil community led to the retrieval of 69 high- and medium- quality MAGs, 213 complete biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) and more than three million predicted proteins. The latter constitutes the CAPP database whose aim is to provide cold-adapted protein sequence information for a protein- and taxon- focused amino acid sequence modification and ultimately to facilitate protein engineering of cold-adapted enzymes.
Permafrost represents a reservoir for the bioprospecting of new compounds and cold-adapted proteins. Cold-adapted proteins are advantageous in several industrial settings because, thanks to their low enzymatic optimum temperature, they do no require heating steps, being more energy sustainable and giving high reaction yields and fewer unwanted secondary chemical reactions. Comparison between thermophilic, mesophilic and psychrophilic proteins can give important information for the bioengineering optimization of cold-adapted proteins. We collected frozen soil samples from 34 different locations along a transect starting at the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) edge and going further away ranging a variety of habitats and geochemical specific site conditions with the aim to obtain a deep read coverage assembly i) to analyze the cold-adapted community in this area, studying the DNA and cDNA microbial distribution in proglacial upper permafrost layer, ii) and to reconstruct high- and medium- quality Metagenome-Assembled Genomes (MAGs) and create a Cold-Adapted Predicted Protein (CAPP) database. The cold-adapted community converged to similar taxonomic composition along the transect and showed solid permafrost-shaped community rather than microbial trends of typical of proglacial systems. However, whereas DNA profiles were conditioned by the distance from the ice edge, cDNA showed major correlation to geochemical trends highlighting how microbial activity is determined by environmental conditions. The construction of the assembly of this conserved frozen soil community led to the retrieval of 69 high- and medium- quality MAGs, 213 complete biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) and more than three million predicted proteins. The latter constitutes the CAPP database whose aim is to provide cold-adapted protein sequence information for a protein- and taxon- focused amino acid sequence modification and ultimately to facilitate protein engineering of cold-adapted enzymes.