“If the industry is going to move forward, it’s going to need new enzymes,” says Eddy Rubin, the director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute. Rubin and 16 colleagues report in the January 28 issue of Science how they discovered nearly 30,000 new enzyme candidates by analyzing DNA collected from a cow’s rumen—the first compartment in the animal’s four-section stomach and home to a vast population of microbes equipped with potent enzymes that help digest the grasses their bovine host consumes.
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