Title: Assembly of genes and genomes from bio-mass degrading cow rumen
The paucity of enzymes able to efficiently deconstruct plant material represents an important bottleneck in industrial scale production of cellulosic biofuels. The cow rumen harbors many uncultured microbes that have evolved optimized molecular machineries for the efficient conversion of biomass into monomeric sugars. In this study we generated and analyzed 100 gb of metagenomic sequence from the microbial community adherent to switchgrass incubated in cow rumen to characterize the genes from and the genomes of organisms involved in its deconstruction. We identified more that 300 novel full length cellulolytic genes and demonstrated approximately a third of the 100 expressed and tested for cellulose degradation activity as positive. Near complete draft coverage of 2 novel microbial genomes was generated. Our deep metagenomic sequencing of biomass adherent microbes followed by computational and functional analyses has dramatically expanded the number and diversity of cellulolytic genes able to degrade biomass as well as revealed the draft genomes for several completely novel uncultured rumen microbes.
