Due to its ability to survive on wood as its sole food source, the shipworm species <i>Lyrodus</i> <i>pedicellatus</i> is an ideal candidate to study the conversion of biomass to energy. Our focus is on biochemical conversion methods that use enzymes from symbiotic bacterial species to degrade biomass into its components, which can then be used for various industry applications. The purpose of this research is to characterize proteins found in the shipworm and its symbionts that are involved in the breakdown of wood. The shipworm houses a colony of endosymbiotic bacteria specialized for the degradation of wood, which are localized in the gill. Only a subset of the symbiont metaproteome is transferred to the digestive tract of the host. This provides a working list of important enzymes – a small fraction of the complete symbiont metaproteome – likely to be directly involved in wood digestion. The proteins encoded by the symbionts of the shipworm have been analyzed using Partial Order Optimum Likelihood (POOL) and Structurally Aligned Local Sites of Activity (SALSA), which are computational techniques developed in the Ondrechen lab. These two computational methods have been used to predict the catalytic residues and functional families of the proteins produced by the shipworm symbionts. Additionally, enzymatic assays, using xylan and various substrates that are components of wood, will be performed with the proteins to confirm experimentally their predicted biochemical functions.

Characterization of cellulose digesting proteins found in shipworm symbionts

256th National Meeting (2018)

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