Plant biomass, in particular structural carbohydrates such as cellulose and hemicellulose, offer one of the most abundant and renewal sources of carbon in nature. A limited number of microbes have evolved the capacity to utilize these highly recalcitrant molecules as an energy source playing a key role in carbon re-cycling. Hydrolysis of plant cell wall polysaccharides is, thus, of intrinsic biological importance and requires the concerted action of a large repertoire of modular enzymes, generally termed Carbohydrate Active enZYmes (CAZymes). In addition, these enzymes recently attracted significant interest in different biotechnological applications. (…) A variety of complementary techniques will be deployed in this project, which includes molecular and structural biology, bio-informatics, high-throughput cloning, expression and protein purification, biochemistry, including enzyme assays, microarray technology, ITC and SPR, to investigate the biological relevance of differences in cellulosome structure in nature.
