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Microorganisms in the marine environment represent a largely untapped source of valuable biomolecules with commercial potential. Historically, scientists could only sequence lab-grown environmental microorganisms and were limited to sequencing one species at a time. The advancement of sequencing technologies has enabled researchers to access a large amount of genomic information from cultivable and non-cultivable microorganisms all at once, known as metagenomics.

Due to our limited ability to accurately predict enzyme function using conventional tools, it has been difficult to identify novel biomolecules from genomic and metagenomic data. This is further complicated because metagenomic data often contains DNA from non-cultivable microorganisms with limited genetic reference information.

A team of German, Norwegian and British Columbian experts from the European Research Area Network undertook a three-year project to solve this problem. They developed a collection of new molecular resources and analytic tools to accelerate the process of identifying valuable proteins and enzymes from genomic and metagenomic data of marine origin. Specifically, they:

• created a large collection of marine genomic libraries;
• developed a new marine-based screening system using Dyadobacter spp.;
• enhanced the efficiency of their screening system to validate biomolecule function; and
• improved the accuracy, speed and scalability of their bioinformatic approaches to discover targets from sequence data.

The bioinformatics approach, developed by Dr. Tokuriki’s team in BC, has led to the identification of enzymes with potential commercial applications in biofilm prevention, cancer treatment, PET imaging and biomanufacturing. Their achievements have also attracted $2.5M of investment to co-establish a start-up company for discovering new enzymes with biomedical applications.