The first 18 months of MetaFluidics have focused on sample acquisition and the development of cutting edge tools towards the screening stage of the project, which will begin officially in month 24.
In that regard, environments have been sampled (always with utmost care of environmental and ABS issues) a) that complement and do not overlap with previous samplings and b) where we have deemed it most likely to find organisms and their enzymes useful in the applications targeted by the MetaFluidics partners. Some of the most relevant enzymes in industry require resistance to drastic conditions, such as those found in the extreme environments sampled, such as arctic soil, hot springs, salterns among others. Other coveted industrial enzymes, those that degrade complex polysaccharides, are found in biotopes such as ruminants and eutrophicated water bodies, which we have also sampled. Finally, we have also sampled the marine invertebrate diversity in the hope of finding relevant bioactive molecules with pharmacological application.
The expression of environmental DNA into functional enzymes that can be assayed is far from universal, as it needs to overcome the lack of congruence between the biology and physicochemical conditions of the organism of origin and those of the expression host. Consequently, the expression of DNA from extreme environments requires the development of new molecular biology tools, which MetaFluidics partners have devised in order to access the diversity of hot, cold and high salinity environments and increase the odds of successful screening operations for these relevant industrial enzymes.
In parallel, conventional screening assays have been reduced to a microfluidic format, that is, the size of the test tube reduced to a microscopic droplet, with a concomitant increase in throughput and reduction in costs. Hydrolytic enzyme assays have already been tested, allowing us to screen millions of samples in a day and yielding tens of hits per screening. These “frontrunners” help us optimize the experimental setups for more demanding assays currently being developed, including assaying enzymes under the “unusual” temperature or salinity conditions found in extreme environments
Congruently with the philosophy of democratization of metagenomics, besides developing easy to implement biological and microfluidic tools, in MetaFluidics we are also developing the next generation of bioinformatics tools, to help process the vast amount of sequence data obtained typically in metagenomics. To that end, the opinion and experience of users has been collected through various initiatives and implemented in test and beta versions of the CLC genomics Microbial Genomics Module, the most used software tool in the market.
