ICOCEM 4. İternational Conference on Civil Environmental Geology and Mining Engineering , Trabzon, Türkiye, 22 Nisan 2019, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.149
Metagenomic Analysis Of Environmental Microbial Sources: Case Study
Of Çal Cave
Hasan Demirci1, Emel Ordu1*
1 Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Yildiz Technical University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, ,
Turkey
*Corresponding Author: bemel@yildiz.edu.tr
Abstract
Microorganisms, which constitute the vast majority of life forms in the environment, have an
important usage in the biotechnological fields such as medicine, food, energy, agriculture etc.
However, it is known that 1% of these microbial diversity have been identified with
traditional cultivation methods, and a very few of them have been cultured and employed in
industrial purpose. Metagenomics, which is a culture-independent approach, and development
of next-generation sequencing technologies provide not only a wealth of phylogenetic
information about the environmental microbial samples but also broaden the microbial
resource utilization for industrially important enzyme researches. Caves where represent
unique environments in terms of microbial flora, are ideal habitats for searching novel
microorganisms, consequently new enzymes. Çal cave in Trabzon is one of the important
karstic caves in Turkey. We explored the microbial diversity of Çal cave by metagenomic
analysis in order to understand the potential of genomic sources in terms of new enzymes and
bioactive compounds meeting industrial demand. Early results showed that cave soil was
dominated by Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria well known as potential sources of bioactive
compounds.
Keywords: Actinobacteria, cave soil, metagenomics, Proteobacteria, taxonomic profiling,
Acknowledgements: "This work was supported by Research Fund of the Yildiz Technical
University. Project Number: FDK-2019-3586 ".