Castor oil plant nitrile hydratases

Another of the projects from JCVI is the castor oil plant (Ricinus communis) genome. The auto-annotation has picked up two alpha subunits of nitrile hydratase, and there is at least one thing that looks like a beta in there too.

Nitrile hydratases and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Marine Microbiology Initiative

Since the most exciting new source of nitrile hydratase sequences has been marine organisms recently, I thought I would have a quick look at the preponderance of nitrile hydratase sequences in marine bacteria. I decided to look at the Moore Foundation's Marine Microbiology Initiative which was run by JCVI. I used the alpha sequence from the nitrile hydratase from Rhodopseudomonas palustris CGA009 as a probe sequence and BLASTped this sequence against the genomes produced by this initiative. This was a slightly more tedious job than I imagined because the BLAST server at JCVI wasn't working, so I had to work through a NCBI BLASTp input, which involves a fair bit of cutting and pasting, AND the taxonomy of the names listed isn't always the same in both databases. Anyway, of the 177 marine microbes which had their genomes listed, 30 produced sequences which had query coverages of greater than 68%, and all were auto-annotated as nitrile hydratase alpha subunits and contained the appropriate metal binding sequence.

A predicted nitrile hydratase from a psychrophilic bacterium

I have been scanning the sequences, and by chance I came across the fact that there is a predicted nitrile hydratase from a bacterium called Octadecabacter antarcticus strain 307 which is a marine organism found at the poles. From the looks of the primary amino acid sequence of the alpha subunit (gb|EDY76981.1|), it is a cobalt-centred NHase.