Most living organisms rely on oxygen to convert food into energy. However, in environments lacking oxygen, life has developed alternative methods of producing energy through a process known as fermentation.
Researchers have recently compiled a comprehensive list of over 8,300 bacteria and archaea that utilize fermentation as a metabolic process. This list was sourced from various outlets, including the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase), both of which are located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
An interactive browser has been developed to allow scientists to explore the genomes and predict the metabolic capabilities of microorganisms that thrive in low-oxygen environments. The findings of this study have been published in Science Advances.
Using data from the JGI’s GOLD and IMG data portals, researchers from the University of California, Davis and UC Santa Barbara compiled a list of prokaryotes with fermentative metabolism. They also conducted searches in IMG/M to identify all protein-coding genes associated with each genome.
The resulting dataset, which is accessible to the research community via an online interactive browser, includes phenotypic records for 8,350 organisms, 4,355 genomes, and 13.6 million genes. The analysis indicates that fermentative metabolism is present in approximately one-third of prokaryotes and can yield around 300 different combinations of metabolites.
2024-03-25 10:00:03
Source from phys.org