Studies on the Cellulose-Degrading System in a Shipworm and its Potential Applications

AbstractThe great shipworm Teredo navalis is a bivalve of the Teredinidae family known for its efficient ability at degrading wood and feeding on sugar molecules constituting its building blocks. The aim of this study was to identify new endogenous genes encoding cellulose-degrading enzymes from the shipworm. We suspect those genes to play an important role in the efficient biomass degradation of T. navalis. We constructed an expressed sequence tag (EST) database of 3‘end cDNAs prepared by reverse transcription of mRNAs prepared from the shipworm whole body. A GS FLX 454 pyrosequencing system was used to sequence the transcriptome. A total of 12,879 contigs and 80,891 singlets were obtained and probed using blast2go. In this short paper we present the preliminary findings of our study