Integrated (Meta) Genomic and Synthetic Biology Approaches to Develop New Biocatalysts

Abstract

In recent years, the marine environment has been the subject of increasing attention from biotechnological and pharmaceutical industries as a valuable and promising source of novel bioactive compounds. Marine biodiscovery programmes have begun to reveal the extent of novel compounds encoded within the enormous bacterial richness and diversity of the marine ecosystem. A combination of unique physicochemical properties and spatial niche-specific substrates, in wide-ranging and extreme habitats, underscores the potential of the marine environment to deliver on functionally novel biocatalytic activities. With the growing need for green alternatives to industrial processes, and the unique transformations which nature is capable of performing, marine biocatalysts have the potential to markedly improve current industrial pipelines. Furthermore, biocatalysts are known to possess chiral selectivity and specificity, a key focus of pharmaceutical drug design. In this review, we discuss how the explosion in genomics based sequence analysis, allied with parallel developments in synthetic and molecular biology, have the potential to fast-track the discovery and subsequent improvement of a new generation of marine biocatalysts.

A Novel Cold Active Esterase from a Deep Sea Sponge Stelletta normani Metagenomic Library

“…One approach which has been successfully employed to this end is metagenomics which helps facilitate access to genetic resources from uncultured microorganism (Kennedy et al, 2011;Baweja et al, 2016;Parages et al, 2016). Lipolytic enzymes such as esterases and lipases which catalyze the hydrolysis and synthesis of ester substrates are widely used in the agrochemical, cosmetics, dairy, detergent, food, paper processing, and pharmaceutical industries amongst others (Jaeger and Eggert, 2002).…”

Characterization of novel glycosyl hydrolases discovered by cell wall glycan directed monoclonal antibody screening and metagenome analysis of maize aerial root mucilage

“… Each lane of the gel image contains the following purified proteins: [L] Precision Plus Protein Kaleidoscope Standard with annotations in kilodaltons (kDa); [ 1 ] α-L-Fucosidase (SlFuc29); [ 2 ] α-N-Arabinofuranosidase (FjArf51); [ 3 ] β-Mannosidase (AfMan2); [ 4 ] Oligosaccharide reducing end xylanase (FjXyn8); [ 5 ] Xylan β-1,4 xylosidase (SlXyn39). …”

Free Marine Natural Products Databases for Biotechnology and Bioengineering

“…Compound dereplication is one of the big hurdles in the discovery of MNPs. To achieve a simpler, faster, and more effective compound dereplication, the collected data in these databases include computational data from bioinformatics, compound curation and compilation, and experimental data from UV spectroscopy, mass spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) . These databases deliver crucial information to the scientific community to discover new MNPs.…”

“…[15] In the last decades, the interest in MNPs has resurged, pushing drug discovery research to collect available chemical data on MNPs. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Furthermore, the chemical differences between marine and terrestrial natural compounds have been assessed, clarifying the importance of assembling available data for current known marine compounds due to their overall peculiar and unique characteristics when compared to terrestrial ones. [24] The availability of free-access chemical databases of MNPs should prompt and accelerate putative applications for a myriad of marine origin compounds.…”