Assembly and analysis of transcriptomes and metatranscriptomes of lignocellulolytic fungi

• Grant number: 11/23300-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: April 01, 2012
• End date: December 31, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Igor Polikarpov
• Grantee: Reginaldo Massanobu Kuroshu
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física de São Carlos (IFSC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The use of plant biomass for production of biofuels and other products is of great interest to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels. Although there are biochemical processes based on cocktail of enzymes that are able to extract sugars from polysaccharides of plant biomass, these processes still cannot break the lignocellulosic structure efficiently. To study how microbial communities degrade lignocellulose in the natural environment, we propose a metatranscriptomic and proteomic approach for the discovery of new enzymes and associated proteins for lignocellulose digestion. Recent metagenomic approaches have relied on similarity searches with known sequences and are thus ineffective at revealing new enzymes that are not similar to those known sequences. Therefore, this proposal focuses on methods and strategies for the assembly of transcriptomes and metatranscriptomes sequenced with second generation sequencers. We will also analyze sequences to identify potential transcripts for expression of recombinant proteins.