A mechanistic overview of ruminal fibre digestion.
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Agricultural Science, Biotechnology, Microbiology
- Keywords
- Carbohydrate active enzymes, Type 9 secretion system, CAZymes, Outer membrane vesicles, Cellulosomes, Polysaccharide utilization loci, Multi-modular CAZymes
- Copyright
- © 2019 Naas et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. A mechanistic overview of ruminal fibre digestion. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27831v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27831v1
Abstract
Ruminants have co-evolved with symbiotic rumen microbiota, which readily convert ingested plant fibres into the nutrients they need to sustain their growth and maintenance. Fibre degradation within the rumen microbiome has been attributed to a limited number of cultivable representatives, which has restricted our ability to understand the different enzymatic machineries that exist. However, via a combination of culturing, meta-omics, bioinformatics, biochemistry and enzymology, we are beginning to expand our insight into the different fibre-digesting strategies that rumen microbiota employ. We discuss findings from studies on well-known Ruminococcus, Fibrobacter and Prevotella isolates, as well as those from poorly understood and as-yet uncultured Bacteroidetes lineages. Collectively, these approaches have revealed new mechanistic information related to the hydrolytic capacity of cellulosomes, free enzymes, outer membrane vesicles, polysaccharide utilization loci and large multi-modular enzymes, which are generating deeper insights into the intricate microbial networks that engage in ruminal fibre digestion.
Author Comment
Submitted as a chapter to a peer-reviewed book.