DOE JGI plumbs termite guts to yield novel enzymes for better biofuel ...(re purified yielding only a few valuable...)

From the sample, about 71 million letters of fragmented genetic code were elaborated and computationally reassembled, like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, to tease out the identities of the microbial players in the mixture and the metabolic profile of the enzymes that they produce. From this reconstructed liquid puzzle emerged the identities of a dozen different phyla -- broad groupings of microbial life forms.

"Our analysis revealed that the hindgut is dominated by two major bacterial lineages, treponemes and fibrobacters," said co-author Phil Hugenholtz, DOE JGI's Microbial Ecology Program head. "Treponemes have long been recognized in the termite gut due to their distinctive cork-screw shape, but fibrobacters were an exciting new find, because they have relatives in the cow rumen known to degrade cellulose. We could directly link the termite fibrobacters and treponemes to enzymes capable of breaking down wood. However, fibrobacters are specialists in this regard and don't appear to participate in sugar fermentation, leaving that to the treponemes. This project has really given me a new appreciation for the lowly termite, a mobile miniature bioreactor."

In the termite P3 compartment alone, more than 500 genes related to the enzymatic deconstruction of cellulose and hemicellulose were identified by Hugenholtz and colleagues. This dataset has since been uploaded by DOE JGI onto its metagenome data management and analysis system, IMG/M (http://img.jgi.doe.gov/) for public access and further analysis.

"Adapting these findings for an industrial-scale system is far from easy," said Eddy Rubin, JGI Director. "Termites can efficiently convert milligrams
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