1) Sugar metabolism

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This has the potential to be a really cool project. I don't know much about anything associated with this subject though, so here comes some research:

Metabolism - Chemical reactions used by organisms to maintain life. Both catabolism and anabolism are examples of metabolism. Catabolism involved the breakdown of materials to harvest energy and anabolism is utilizing energy to build things like proteins (wikipedia).

Of sugar - sugar metabolism (such as the breakdown of the simple sugar glucose) is actually a specialized form of carbohydrate metabolism. Chitin is one type of carbohydrate that may be broken down to harvest energy. If our species is in an environment containing some fungal life or arthropods (chitin is present in both these types of life), perhaps they are obtaining energy from the breakdown of chitin as well as other sugars and carbohydrates in their environment (wikipedia).

In order to figure out what is going on in our species, we will need to look at all the genes with predicted functions to determine which genes may be contributing to various types of metabolism. We should also use KEGG in order to determine which proteins in these metabolism pathways may be missing. Perhaps from this information we could search through the genes with no known function for potential fillers in these pathways.