How salt-loving archaea can assist with biofuel production

Halophilic bacteria thrive in environments with very high concentrations of salt such as the waters and sediments of salt lakes and saline soils. One of the reasons why the DOE JGI has been sequencing halophiles under the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA) project and the Community Sequencing Program is because they have salt-adapted enzymes that could be used in breaking down complex sugars, a process applicable to biofuel production. Sequencing these extremophiles also provides researchers with more information about their metabolic capabilities.

Published online May 25, 2011 in PLoS ONE, a team of researchers from the DOE JGI, the DSMZ in Germany and INEOS Bio in Arkansas

conducted a comparative genomic analysis of five newly-sequenced halophilicarchaea with five previously sequenced halophiles. All halophiles were sequenced at the DOE JGI and then assembled with the help of DOE JGI software such as Prodigal and GenePRIMP before these genomes were analyzed using the DOE JGI’s Integrated Microbial Genomes Expert Review system.

“Plant material is pretreated in order to remove lignin and hemicellulose and to reduce the crystallinity of cellulose,” wrote the study’s senior author Nikos Kyrpides of DOE JGI and his colleagues in their report. “Several different methods are used, some of which involve incubation with acid or base. After treatment with these chemicals, a neutralization step is required before further processing, and this produces a salty solution. Salt-adapted glycosylhydrolases may be useful at this point in the process.”

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