Unraveling the camel rumen microbiome through metaculturomics approach for agriculture waste hydrolytic potential

Cellulose is the most abundant natural polymer present on Earth in the form of agriculture waste. Hydrolysis of agriculture waste for simple fermentable reducing sugars is the bottleneck in the area of biofuel generation and other value-added products. The present study aims to utilize the camel rumen as a bioreactor for potent cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic bacteria by altering the feed types with varying cellulosic concentrations. A total of 6716 bacterial cultures were subjected to three layers of screening, where plate zymography and chromophoric substrate screening served as primary screening method for cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic potential. The potential isolates were genetically grouped using RAPD, and 51 representative isolates from each group were subjected to molecular identification through 16S rDNA sequencing, followed by quantification of various cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic enzymes. Out of 51 potent isolates, 5 isolates had high endoglucanase activity ranging from 0.3 to 0.48 U/ml. The selected five key isolates identified as Pseudomonas, Paenibacillus, Citrobacter, Bacillus subtilis, and Enterobacter were employed for hydrolyzing the various agriculture residues and resulted in approximately 0.4 mg/ml of reducing sugar. Furthermore, the metaculturomics approach was implemented to deduce the total cultured diversity through 16S rRNA amplicon library sequencing. The metaculturomics data revealed the dominance of proteobacteria and unidentified bacterial population in all four feed types, which indicates the possibility of culturing novel cellulose-deconstructing bacteria. Moreover, the presence of diverse hydrolytic enzymes in cultured isolates supports the usage of these bacteria in bio-processing of agriculture waste residues and obtaining the biofuels and other value-added products.