Commercially useful enzymes (CUEs) are enzyme

Enzyme

Enzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. In enzymatic reactions, the molecules at the beginning of the process, called substrates, are converted into different molecules, called products. Almost all chemical reactions in a biological cell need enzymes in order to occur at rates...

s which have commercial uses. Microbial

Microorganism

A microorganism or microbe is a microscopic organism that comprises either a single cell , cell clusters, or no cell at all...

 enzymes have well-known applications as biocatalysts in several areas of industry, such as biotechnology

Biotechnology

Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...

, agriculture

Agriculture

Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...

, pharmaceuticals, etc. Metagenomic data

Data

The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...

 provide a unique resource for discovering novel commercially useful enzymes (CUEs) from yet unidentified microbes belonging to complex microbial communities in diverse ecosystem

Ecosystem

An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....

s.

Classification

A set of 510 CUEs was manually curated using publicly available information and classified into nine broad application categories based on their function. By comprehensive homology

Homology (biology)

Homology forms the basis of organization for comparative biology. In 1843, Richard Owen defined homology as "the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function". Organs as different as a bat's wing, a seal's flipper, a cat's paw and a human hand have a common underlying...

-based mining of ten diverse publicly available metagenomic data sources, several novel CUEs, homologous to those in the set of known CUEs, were identified. Using this strategy, a comprehensive Metagenomic BioMining Engine (MetaBioME) platform to facilitate homology-based computational identification of homologs for known CUEs from metagenomic datasets is developed. This is a useful resource to identify novel homologs to the existing known CUEs and to also identify new ones, both of which can be used as leads for further experimental verification.
This is available at MetaBioME .