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User:Jan-Hendrik Hehemann
I studied biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Hamburg (Germany) and graduated in 2005. In 2006 I received an early stage Marie Curie fellowship to start a PhD, with Dr. Mirjam Czjzek at the Biologique de Roscoff (France). During my PhD I worked on glycoside hydrolases from the marine flavobacterium Zobellia galactanivorans specific for cell wall polysaccharides from red algae. I focused on a new subfamily in GH16 GH16, of which the specificity was unknown, and discovered that they are beta-porphyranases. These enzymes degrade the polysaccharide porphyran from red seaweeds like Porphyra sp. which is more generally known as Nori and used to make one of my favourite foods, the Maki-Sushi roll. When we searched for other porphyranases in public sequence databases we found them solely in genomes of marine bacteria and not in terrestrial bacteria probably because porphyran is an algal polysaccharide and absent in terrestrial plants. We found however an exception, one porphyranase was encoded in the genome of Bacteroides plebeius, a human gut bacterium that was isolated from a Japanese individual. A subsequent analysis of available gut metagenome datasets revealed that porphyranases are common in gut bacteria from the Japanese people and so far absent in others. We suggested that the consumption of non sterile and fresh food with associated bacteria -“The Sushi Factor”- created contact between bacteria from the ocean and the human gut and led to the horizontal gene transfer of porphyranase genes [1].
Since March 2010 I am working as a PostDoc with ^^^Alisdair Boraston^^^ at the University of Victoria (Canada) and in August 2010 I received an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship to work on B. plebeius and how this microbe benefitted through its update from the sea.
In addition to human gut microbes I am very interested in organic matter degradation in the ocean and how marine bacteria degrade algal polysaccharides. This is an exciting and important field of research because the CAZymes used to degrade marine algae are largely unknown, which allowed us to make a discovery like “The Sushi Factor” [1].