Abstract
BackgroundIn light of the rapid decrease in fossils fuel reserves and an increasing demand for energy, novel methods are required to explore alternative biofuel production processes to alleviate these pressures. A wide variety of molecules which can either be used as biofuels or as biofuel precursors are produced using microbial enzymes. However, the common challenges in the industrial implementation of enzyme catalysis for biofuel production are the unavailability of a comprehensive biofuel enzyme resource, low efficiency of known enzymes, and limited availability of enzymes which can function under extreme conditions in the industrial processes.MethodsWe have developed a comprehensive database of known enzymes with proven or potential applications in biofuel production through text mining of PubMed abstracts and other publicly available information. A total of 131 enzymes with a role in biofuel production were identified and classified into six enzyme classes and four broad application categories namely ‘Alcohol production’, ‘Biodiesel production’, ‘Fuel Cell’ and ‘Alternate biofuels’. A prediction tool ‘Benz’ was developed to identify and classify novel homologues of the known biofuel enzyme sequences from sequenced genomes and metagenomes. ‘Benz’ employs a hybrid approach incorporating HMMER 3.0 and RAPSearch2 programs to provide high accuracy and high speed for prediction.ResultsUsing the Benz tool, 153,754 novel homologues of biofuel enzymes were identified from 23 diverse metagenomic sources. The comprehensive data of curated biofuel enzymes, their novel homologs identified from diverse metagenomes, and the hybrid prediction tool Benz are presented as a web server which can be used for the prediction of biofuel enzymes from genomic and metagenomic datasets. The database and the Benz tool is publicly available at http://metabiosys.iiserb.ac.in/biofueldb& http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/biofueldb.
Highlights
The global increase in energy demand and decline in the available stock of fossil fuels has become a challenge and requires a search for alternate sources of fuels and energy
Out of the four categories, ‘Alcohol production’ contains the highest (74), followed by Biodiesel (30), Fuel Cell (27) and ‘Alternate’ which contains the lowest (19) number of enzymes (Table 1 and Table S1). This implies that almost half of the total numbers of known biofuel enzymes are involved in alcohol production
This can be ascribed to their high occurrences in various biological reactions, including those which lead to biofuel production
Summary
The global increase in energy demand and decline in the available stock of fossil fuels has become a challenge and requires a search for alternate sources of fuels and energy In this scenario, enzyme catalyzed conversion of biomass to biofuels provides an ideal source. The demand for biodiesel is increasing, the use of biodiesel has a disadvantage of increasing the prices and reducing the availability of vegetable crops for meeting the global food demand In this scenario, microbial fermentation of biomass (including non-food crops) for the production of biodiesel serves as an ideal alternative medium (Oyola-Robles et al, 2014). In light of the rapid decrease in fossils fuel reserves and an increasing demand for energy, novel methods are required to explore alternative biofuel production processes to alleviate these pressures. The database and the Benz tool is publicly available at http://metabiosys.iiserb.ac.in/biofueldb & http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/biofueldb
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