Genomic Analysis for Haloacid Dehalogenase in Bacillus megaterium WSH-002

Bacterial dehalogenation is one of the processes that can reduce environmental pollutions. The attributes of B. megaterium that can grow in a polluted environment suggested that its genome contains pollutant degrading genes. To date, there were no reports related to dehalogenase in B. megaterium WSH-002 and how it was regulated. Therefore, the presence of environmentally important genes that can detoxify organohalogens in many microbial genomes, including B. megaterium WSH-002 will be investigated. The genome sequence of B. megaterium WSH-002 was retrieved from NCBI databases. It was then annotated through the RAST server to identify all the putative dehalogenase gene sequences. The selected gene sequence was converted into amino and went through BLASTp via UniProt database. The highest percentage identity of the amino acid sequence to any dehalogenases was subjected to further identification of specific dehalogenase domain using InterPro Scan server. The results from genome annotations have shown its potential for bioremediation due to the presence of putative dehalogenase protein. Only one type of haloacid dehalogenase was identified. It was classified as haloacid dehalogenase type II because its amino acid sequence is highly identical with HAD_type_II and HAD_L2-DEX. The study concluded that the genome of B. megaterium WSH-002 contains a haloacid dehalogenase gene that is useful for the biodegradation of halogenated compounds. In the future, further investigation on the expression of the dehalogenase gene as recombinant protein and to study its protein structure and functions will be considered.