The Co-Evolution Mining website (CEM) is set up by Fei Tao, which is hosted at Food & Enviromental Microbiology Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.
Co-evolution occurred when at least two species’ genetic compositions reciprocally affect each other’s evolution, which is ubiquitous in nature. In biology, there exists the co-evolution between enzymes and their hosts. In the process of co-evolution, the specific properties of various enzymes are adapted to that of their hosts because of a long period of evolution to adjust with the surrounding environment, making them evolve each other. For mining an enzyme with a specific function, it is more feasible to predict the host with a specific function through the concept of co-evolution rather than predicting the properties of the enzyme itself. Therefore, this website adopts the concept of co-evolution for mining enzymes with specific properties, which can solve many problems in synthetic biology and enzyme engineering, such as the host-guest incompatibility between production hosts and non-native enzymes.
At present, our website has developed the procedures for predicting thermophilic enzymes derived from a number of possible thermophilic microbial genomes, which can greatly meet the needs of thermophilic hosts to enable co-evolution mining. Later, our website will continue to develop a series of programs for mining other functional enzymes according to the concept of co-evolution, such as anaerobic enzymes, acid-resistant and alkali-resistant enzymes, etc.