Team:Bilkent UNAM Turkey/Biodegradation

From 2011.igem.org

Disintegration of chemical materials by means of biological processes. Quite similar to biotransformation (in fact, biodegradation can be considered a subsection of biotransformation) and carried out by most organisms either to detoxify harmful products or to obtain energy by saprophagy. The latter category is populated by a great diversity of fungi and bacteria, many with enzymes capable of digesting even extremely resilient compounds such as chitin and cellulose. Those are of great interest as they may offer alternative means to remove common pollutants from contaminated environments. Our TNT-degradation project, however, focuses on an enzyme of which adaptive significance is unclear but is very unlikely to have been used for digestion (it is instead proposed that nsfI is used either in metabolic pathways or to degrade toxic nitrocompounds and confer a survival advantage in polluted environments)