Investigating microbiome and transcriptome data to uncover the key microbial community involved in lignocellulose degradation within the Deulajhari hot spring consortium

datasets. Proteobacteria exhibited the highest relative abundance in the metagenomics dataset, while Firmicutes was highly abundant in the metatranscriptomics dataset. At the genus level, a total of 92 and 25 genera were predicted in both datasets, with lignocellulose degrading Meiothermus being highly abundant in both metagenomics and metatranscriptomics datasets. We also observed that the unknown bacteria and unidentified sequences were found in significant proportion in the metatranscriptomics dataset. We assembled and functionally annotated approximately 23,960 contigs using the Prokka pipeline. Among the SEED category, the most expressed and annotated microbial genes fall under the un-known category as well as Biotin synthesis and their utilization. Furthermore, some of these genes were implicated in the degradation of aromatic amino acids, D-mannitol, and D-mannose. These findings contribute to our understanding of how the composition and abundance of bacterial communities facilitate lignocellulose degradation in extreme environments and biofuel generation.(c) 2023 Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)