Cayman

Cayman profiles carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes) in microbial communities using a hierarchical substrate annotation scheme to analyze CAZyme repertoires and identify substrate preferences.

Key Features:

• Hierarchical substrate annotation scheme: Cayman classifies CAZymes by substrate specificity across multiple levels of granularity.
• CAZyme repertoire profiling: Cayman enables large-scale genomic and metagenomic surveys of CAZyme content in microbial communities.
• Taxonomic driver identification: Cayman pinpoints the taxonomic drivers underlying CAZyme community shifts between sample groups.
• Co-localizing domain analysis: Cayman predicts novel substrates by analyzing co-localizing CAZyme domains in genomic contexts.

Scientific Applications:

• Mucin-foraging species identification: Cayman identifies microbial species specialized in mucin degradation through CAZyme profiling.
• Dietary pattern meta-analysis: Cayman compares CAZyme repertoires between Western and non-Western gut metagenomes to assess fibre-degrading capacity.
• Disease-associated CAZyme characterization: Cayman detects depletion of dietary fibre-targeting CAZymes and enrichment of glycosaminoglycan-targeting CAZymes in colorectal cancer metagenomes.
• Novel substrate prediction: Cayman predicts previously uncharacterized substrates for disease-enriched CAZymes through domain co-localization analysis.

Methodology:

Cayman employs a hierarchical substrate annotation scheme for CAZyme classification and performs co-localizing CAZyme domain analysis for substrate prediction.