GEOPHYSICAL ACTIVITIES DURING MAMBA
AND MIDDLE CRUISES
The Projects aim at the mining of enzymes and metabolic pathways from extremophilic marine organisms and metagenomes from microbial communities from peculiar marine environments and consequent funnelling the new enzymatic reactions and processes towards the new biotechnological applications. Projects are build up on the scientific and technological excellence of individual academic and industrial partners, and beyond that, on application of the state-of-the-art technologies for archiving, molecular activity screening, protein structure elucidation, enzyme engineering and directed evolution and establishing new biotechnological processes (biocatalysis, synthesis of fine chemicals, etc.). Marine sampling hotspots to produce the metagenomic resources for their further exploration, and microorganisms with recently sequenced genomes cover the whole diversity of marine microbial life at its limits (hypersaline, low and high temperature, high pressure and low water activity conditions, etc.), which is of great interest to explore the new mechanisms determining the limits to life in the biosphere, but is also of significant relevance for discovery of new industrially relevant enzymatic processes. The central approach of the enzyme discovery is based on the “Activity First” principle, which, in contrast to the massive sequencing and consequent “genome/metagenome gazing” approach revealing the genes encoding the enzymes of already known protein families, thus allows to directly access the group of metabolic reactions of biotechnological relevance.