Genome mining of the human gut microbiota for biotechnologically exploitable enzyme activities

The human gut microbiota has a mutualistic relationship with the host, creating a profound but poorly understood impact of host health, development, and disease. Glycans are the main nutrient source for the gut microbiota and these can come from dietary fibre or human glycans and polysaccharides, for example. Gut microbes use carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes) to degrade the many different types of glycans and therefore have a plethora of CAZymes with different activities to make this possible. This project focusses on the almost completely underexplored bacterial species and the CAZymes it produces. The genomic potential of this species suggests it will metabolise host glycans as there are putative sialidases and fucosidases, for example. Furthermore, there are a high number of putative CAZymes with no family, so this project has huge potential to describe these.