Seminar | Mining the microbiomes of food animals using glyco-tools and genome-enabling technologies to discover new functions in microbial carbohydrate metabolism

Seminar: W.D. Abbott- Scientist at AAFC-Lethbridge

 Room: M145- Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science

Title: Mining the microbiomes of food animals using glyco-tools and genome-enabling technologies to discover new functions in microbial carbohydrate metabolism

Abstract

Carbohydrates that comprise the cell wall of plants, fungi, and seaweeds represent underexploited opportunities to selectively modulate rumen microbiomes with the goal of benefiting animal production. Chemically distinct polysaccharides added to the diet have the potential to stimulate dynamic changes in community structure, and improve feed efficiency and host performance. Commonly, metabolic responses of microorganisms to dietary polysaccharides are studied indirectly, primarily by sequencing methods, which has created a bottleneck in translating sequence information into function. In this regard, molecular tools and “direct” methods that help unravel the mechanisms driving polysaccharide-microbe interactions in higher-throughput will benefit how we interpret and program functional changes in microbiome communities. To address this, our team has been deploying a multifaceted approach, involving selective anaerobic isolation, comparative metabolic pathway and saccharolytic fingerprinting analyses fluorescent glycan conjugates, and streamlined enzymology to evaluate saccharolytic responses of intestinal bacteria and microbiomes to dietary polysaccharides. Presented here is high-resolution in silico analyses, X-ray crystallography, selective growth profiling, and single-cell fluorescence microscopy to demonstrate that strains of rumen Bacteroides spp. have evolved tailored pathways for the competitive utilization of dietary polysaccharides in the gut ecosystems of different animals. This research platform can be extended to study other glycan-microbiome relationships and presents a useful combination of molecular tools for carbohydrate active enzyme discovery