Detection and Comparative Analysis of Uber-operons of FabZ gene Responsible for Fatty Acid Biosynthesis in Nostoc Punctiforme Cyanobacterium

Abstract

The increasing price of petroleum products has necessitated the development of alternative fuel energy. The long alkyl chains that represent nature’s ‘petroleum’, are today isolated from microbes, plant and animal oils by amore scalable, controllable and economic routes.Hence, in this perspective, the present study was aimed at exploring the uber-operons of FabZ gene responsible for the synthesis of fatty acid in an aquatic nitrogen-fixing and filamentous cyanobacterium called Nostoc punctiforme. Rearrangement of genomes occur randomly and frequently during evolution. Prokaryotic organisms maintain genes of similar function and that are involved in the same cellular process in clusters of same transcriptional orientation and regulation. The uber-operons are the set of functionally related genes maintained in close proximity in the genome, which assist in genome annotation and the discovery of regulatory elements. Thus, the main objective of the study was to identify the genes those were associated as uber-operon in the fatty acid pathway of Nostoc punctiforme and also to check for its involvement in different pathways based on the ‘neighbourhoods’ assembly and phylogeny.

Keywords: Biofuel, renewable resources, Fatty acids, Uber-operons, Cyanobacterium