No abstract

Subseafloor sediment samples derived from a sediment core of 60 m length were used to enrich psychrophilic aerobic bacteria on cellulose, xylan, chitin, and starch. A variety of species belonging to Alpha- and Gammaproteobacteria and to Flavobacteria were isolated from sediment depths between 12 and 42 mbsf. Metagenomic DNA purified from the pooled enrichments was sequenced and analyzed for phylogenetic composition and presence of genes encoding carbohydrate-active enzymes. More than 200 open reading frames coding for glycoside hydrolases were identified, and more than 60 of them relevant for enzymatic degradation of lignocellulose. Four genes encoding β-glucosidases with less than 52% identities to characterized enzymes were chosen for recombinant expression in Escherichia coli. In addition one endomannanase, two endoxylanases, and three β-xylosidases were produced recombinantly. All genes could be actively expressed. Functional analysis revealed discrepancies and additional variability for the recombinant enzymes as compared to the sequence-based predictions.

The cold-adapted pullulanase Pul13A is an industrial useful amylolytic enzyme, but its low solubility is the major bottleneck to produce the protein in recombinant form. In a previous approach, a complex and time-consuming purification strategy including a step-wise dialysis procedure using decreasing concentrations of urea to renature the insoluble protein from inclusion bodies had been established. In this study, a truncation strategy was developed to facilitate the purification and handling of the type-I pullulanase. Pul13A has a size of 155-kDa with a multidomain architecture that is composed of the following predicted modules: CBM41/E-set/Amy-Pul/DUF3372/E-set/E-set/E-set, with CBM and E-set domains being putative carbohydrate-binding modules, Amy-Pul is the catalytic region and DUF is a domain of unknown function. Consecutive N- and C-terminal deletions of domains were applied to construct minimized enzyme variants retaining pullulanase activity and exhibiting improved renaturation efficiencies. A total of seven truncation constructs were generated and tested, which still led to the production of inclusion bodies. However, the parallel deletion of the exterior CBM41 and E-set domain enabled the direct refolding of active enzymes during one-step dialysis in urea-free buffer. Catalytic properties of truncation construct Pul13A-N1/C1 were not impaired indicating that this enzyme variant may be superior for industrial applications over the full-length pullulanase.