07 July 2022

Xylan is a highly abundant biopolymer with potential to be modified obtaining outstanding chemical and physiochemical properties. Utilization of xylan remain limited as processing of the biopolymer remain not efficient due to shortage of relevant enzymes needed for modification. Efficient enzymatic xylan-debranching is desirable to reduce water solubility of the biopolymer for successful introduction to biobased consumer products. GH43_29 subfamily a-L-arabinofuranosidases liberating L-arabinose directly from branched xylan are required for effective conversion of the raw biopolymer to a high-value product component. Manual as well as programmatical sequence-curated mining was implemented for candidate arabinofuranosidase prioritization for production and characterization aiming subsequent exploitation in xylan debranching. Candidate sequences (1375) indexed in CAZy database as attributed to GH43_29 subfamily were analyzed in respect of domain organisation, conservative motif patterns and sequence identity to characterized xylan-debranching enzymes resulting in prioritized sequences (6) of manual mining. SINTEF data mining pipeline based on the HMMER suite and the dbCAN2 meta server with the profile Hidden Markov Model (HMM) of GH43_29 subfamily was used for programmatical sequence mining. Candidate sequences indexed in Marine Metagenomics databases of University of Tromsø (Norway) and proprietary databases of SINTEF Industry (Norway) were analyzed resulting in prioritized sequences (6) of programmatical mining. Prioritized sequences were selected.

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