Commercially useful enzymes (CUEs) are

enzyme Enzymes () are proteins that act as biological catalysts by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different molecules known as products. A ...

s which have commercial uses.

Microbial A microorganism, or microbe,, ''mikros'', "small") and ''organism'' from the el, ὀργανισμός, ''organismós'', "organism"). It is usually written as a single word but is sometimes hyphenated (''micro-organism''), especially in olde ...

enzymes have well-known applications as

biocatalyst Enzymes () are proteins that act as biological catalysts by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different molecules known as products. A ...

s in several areas of industry, such as

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...

agriculture Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to ...

pharmaceuticals A medication (also called medicament, medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal drug or simply drug) is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. Drug therapy (pharmacotherapy) is an important part of the medical field and rel ...

, etc.

Metagenomic Metagenomics is the study of genetic material recovered directly from environmental or clinical samples by a method called sequencing. The broad field may also be referred to as environmental genomics, ecogenomics, community genomics or microb ...

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted ...

provide a unique resource for discovering novel commercially useful enzymes (CUEs) from yet unidentified microbes belonging to complex

microbial communities Microbial population biology is the application of the principles of population biology to microorganisms. Distinguishing from other biological disciplines Microbial population biology, in practice, is the application of population ecology and popu ...

in diverse

ecosystem An ecosystem (or ecological system) consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the syste ...

Classification

A set of 510 CUEs was manually curated using publicly available information and classified into nine broad application categories based on their function. By comprehensive

homology Homology may refer to: Sciences Biology *Homology (biology), any characteristic of biological organisms that is derived from a common ancestor * Sequence homology, biological homology between DNA, RNA, or protein sequences *Homologous chrom ...

-based mining of ten diverse publicly available metagenomic data sources, several novel CUEs, homologous to those in the set of known CUEs, were identified. Using this strategy, a comprehensive Metagenomic BioMining Engine (MetaBioME) platform to facilitate homology-based computational identification of homologs for known CUEs from metagenomic datasets is developed. This is a useful resource to identify novel homologs to the existing known CUEs and to also identify new ones, both of which can be used as leads for further experimental verification. This is available at MetaBioME.

References

* Enzymes {{microbiology-stub