Last year I put up a blogpost about finding what looked like the alpha chain of a nitrile hydratase in the eukaryote Aurecococcus anophagefferens which is something that makes up brown tide algal blooms. The paper that introduces the genomic data which provided my hit back then is
Christopher Gobler, Dianna Berry, Sonya Dyhrman, and Steven Wilhelm. "Niche of harmful alga Aureococcus anophagefferens revealed through ecogenomics" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 108.11 (2011): 4352-4357
This little beastie has a whole load of enzymes involved in degrading organic nitrogen containing compounds. The authors of the paper suggest that since it lives in an ecological niche which is typically low in organic nitrogen but high in organic nitrogen so having a suite of enzymes to harvest nitrogen from organics is a strategy to give a competitive advantage over other phytoplankton which don't have this ability. There is a supplemental figure which shows the list of these enzymes and whether competing species have them. A rough cut and paste below shows that it is really out on its own from this data.
This organism also seems to be a Guinness world record holder for the number of selenium containing proteins in its proteome (56). Interesting but not entirely relevant for this blog!
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