Biodiversity
About Biodiversity
Industrial biotechnology is a rapidly growing field. The analysis of natural biodiversity provides a huge potential for the identification of enzymes and strains needed for the development of new biotechnological products or for the optimisation of current industrial processes. c-LEcta utilises the potentials of microbial and metagenomic diversity to provide customised industrial biotech solutions.
c-LEcta has access to more than 5,000 pre-selected microbial strains as well as to a large number of metagenomic DNAs from special habitats. All of these genomes and metagenomes exist in a ready-to-screen format in proprietary screening vectors suitable for the screening in different microbial hosts.
With c-LEcta’s patented cluster screening technology it is possible to conduct highly-predictive screens for enzymes very rapidly. Depending on the desired enzyme activity, more than a million different clones per day can be screened.
Metagenome
In many microbial habitats less than 1% of the microorganisms can be cultivated under laboratory conditions. To exploit such uncultivable microbial diversity, approaches can be applied that address the whole genetic information of a habitat, i.e. the metagenome. c-LEcta has built a technology platform based on patent-protected c-LEcta Cluster Screening that efficiently addresses metagenomic diversity.
c-LEcta possesses a large number of different metagenomic expression libraries in proprietary screening vectors and screening hosts. Among these libraries are also those from very special habitats such as metagenomes isolated from sheep rumen, chemical industry-contaminated soil or high-temperature decomposition material.
c-LEcta’s activity-based screening approach was used, for instance, to identify numerous new enzymatic activities in the sheep rumen library (such as esterases, lipases or alcohol dehydrogenases) with very low sequence identity to known enzymes.
Microbial Diversity
c-LEcta possesses a collection of more than 5000 pre-qualified, unique microorganisms from different habitats. These microorganisms are selected, for example, due to their ability to survive under extreme conditions or due to a pronounced production of secondary metabolites. Our strain collection mainly contains actinomycetes and bacilli.
The DNA of these microorganisms is available in ready-to-screen expression libraries; we can either screen these libraries directly or use our strain collection for enrichment cultures to accumulate strains possessing the desired activities. The DNA of those enriched strains can then also be cloned in our proprietary screening vectors to generate enriched expression libraries.
