Identification of additional enzymes that can degrade cellulose efficiently should help in the development of biofuels on an industrial scale. Uncultured microorganisms living in cow rumen are highly effective at degrading plant cell walls. Hess et al. used metagenomics and single-genome sequencing to assemble draft genomes from microbes adhering to rumen-incubated switchgrass to identify nearly 28,000 genes related to known biomass-degrading families.
Read more in This Week in Science. Read the full paper by Hess et al. at http://bit.ly/fJ3qps