Plant carbohydrate active enzyme(CAZyme)repertoires a comparative study

Carbohydrate active enzymes (CAZymes) include enzymes for the synthesis, degradation, modification, and recognition of carbohydrate molecules in all living organisms. Plants typically encode 1,000+ CAZyme genes in their genomes. Half of these CAZymes are involved in the synthesis of the highly recalcitrant plant cell walls, the major renewable resource for producing lignocellulosic biofuels. Recently the study of plant CAZymes has been pushed to the front because of the bioenergy research, where CAZymes are intensively studied in order to understand the complex cell wall biosynthesis pathways and address the cell wall recalcitrance to develop transgenic plants. Here we gave an overview of previous efforts on the genome-wide study of CAZymes in sequenced plants. We emphasized the importance of CAZymes to the plant cell wall research, introduced web-based resources for CAZymes, and further presented a brief comparative study of CAZyomes (CAZyme gene repertories) across 30+ fully sequenced plants and algae. We also demonstrated that the detailed phylogenetic analysis is very useful for the further functional and evolutionary study of plant CAZymes.