A genomic approach for identification of fungal genes involved in pentachlorophenol degradation.

A high number of micro-organisms are capable of degrading recalcitrant organic pollutants in a broad range of habitats and conditions and they have the potential to be exploited in biotechnological application for bioremediation. Among these, we selected a strain of the fungus Byssochlamys nivea for its ability to grow on pentachlorophenol-contaminated soil samples. The use of this fungus for benefit of humankind, however, is strongly limited by the scarcity of information on biochemical processes for degradation of recalcitrant organic pollutants in B. nivea. In addition, the lack of reference genomic data in B. nivea discourages investigation on structural and functional diversity accounting for this species to interact with contaminants. In order to bridge the gap of sequence data to study genetic basis of diversity in B. nivea we generated a 3'-cDNA library and deeply sequenced it using a Next Generation Sequencing approach. Assembling of reads resulted in 33,000 contigs and 37% of them showed a BLAST hit in the NCBI "non-redundant protein sequence database". The provided library is expected to encourage the use of B. nivea as model specie for structural and functional investigation in genomics. Particularly, this cDNA library could benefit biotechnological approaches aimed at investigating catabolic processes involved in degradation of recalcitrant organic pollutants for development of innovative bioremediation systems