Predicting biodegradation

Biodegradation is important for natural and industrial cycling of environme ntal chemicals. Industries and government regulators increasingly seek to k now the fate of chemicals in the environment and thus prevent potential neg ative impacts on human or ecosystem health. However, millions of organic co mpounds are known, and most will remain unstudied with respect to biodegrad ation. This necessitates the development of organized biodegradation inform ation coupled with predictive methods. Biodegradation prediction methods ar e being developed using the information contained in the University of Minn esota Biocatalysis/ Biodegradation database. Heuristic rules are derived fr om compiled biodegradation information. Additional rules are generated by d econstructing compounds into a set of the 40 most common organic functional groups. The rules consist of deriving biochemically plausible catabolic re actions for each of the functional groups. More complex compounds, containi ng multiple functional groups, are analysed using higher order rules requir ing prioritizing enzymatic attack and reactions cleaving functional groups. While biodegradation prediction, like weather prediction, will never be pe rfect, it can be an important tool for guiding industry, regulators and exp erimentalists.