Operon-based Discovery of carbohydrate-active Enzymes – ODE

The aim of this project is to boost the discovery of enzyme families involved in glycan breakdown. Glycan breakdown is central to human and animal nutrition, fungal/plant-cell wall remodeling, host-pathogen interactions, biomass reutilization, etc.. However, the discovery of novel enzyme families is strongly limited by the selection and characterization of a target by independent experimental research groups. The present project will provide a large-scale computational solution by taking advantage of annotation/data accumulated in CAZy and PULDB (for Carbohydrate-Active enZyme and Polysaccharide Utilization Loci databases) to perform comparative genomics approaches. Guided by the genomic context, protein families of unknown function that are the most likely to become carbohydrate-active enzyme families will be identified, and their substrate category predicted. To support our prediction and concept, experimental validation will be conducted on selected cases.