Scientists devise a new tool to help identifynovel bioremediation enzymes
Scientists devise a new tool to help identifynovel bioremediation enzymes
New Delhi (India Science
Wire): The global population is continuing to rise at an unprecedented rate
with the present estimate suggesting more than 9 billion people in 2050. With
the growing needs of this ever-increasing population, industrialization has
become inevitable. But this global industrial revolution has at the same time,
contributed to polluting the environment by producing highly toxic chemicals and
biological wastes in bulk.
In order to devise novel bio-based remediation techniques,
the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) has successfully developed an
innovative bioinformatics tool named RemeDB, which would help identify novel bioremediation-related
enzymes from a huge set of metagenomic sequence data. RemeDB would thus be
helping the scientists to explore novel biomolecules which would lead to eco-friendly
remediation measures and increase the prospect of identifyingnovel enzymes
which have the potential to degrade environmental pollutants such as
hydrocarbon, dye,and plastic.
Bioremediation is a technique to decontaminate the
polluted sites, either aquatic or terrestrial, effectively, without generating
secondary wastes and involves naturally occurring organisms to break down or
neutralize inorganic and organic pollutants into less toxic or nontoxic forms.
Thus, the RemeDB software tool would be a boon in prospecting environmental
metagenomic datasets which may lead to an eco-friendly conservation effort.
RemeDB developed by NIOT is provided with a huge database
of pollutant degrading enzyme (PDEs) withmore than 30,000 enzyme sequences that
would help bio- prospect genomes and metagenomes forenzymes that wouldremediatepollutants
such as hydrocarbons, dyes, and plastics. Scientists involved in the project said
that the new database would provide scope for identifying novel enzyme
sequences, which have the potential to degrade pollutants into non-toxic
substances. According to NIOT scientists, next-generation sequencing technologieshave
enabled large scale screening of potential enzymes from environmental samples
and RemeDBassistsin identifying them with greater precision.
Metagenomics is the study of genetic material (total
genomic DNA) recovered directly from environmental samples without culturing
microbes in the laboratory. Scientists used in silico (computer
simulation in reference to biological experiments) approach to develop the
RemeDB tool containing a total of 30,925 sequences of PDEs (pollutant degrading
enzyme) derived from the Uniprot
database, including 14,442 sequences belonging to the major enzyme class of
hydrocarbon degradation, 3411 sequences for dye degradation, and 1,308
sequences involved in plastic degradation.
Led by Dr. Dharani, G. of Marine Biotechnology Division, Ocean Science and Technology for Islands Group, NIOT, Ministry of Earth Sciences, and the research team comprised of Sai H. Sankara Subramanian, Karpaga Raja SundariBalachandran, and Vijaya Raghavan Rangamaran at NIOT. Their research paper has recently been published in the Journal of Computational Biology.
(India Science Wire)