Marine Metagenome as a Resource for Novel Enzymes

Abstract

More than 99% of identified prokaryotes, including many from the marine environment, cannot be cultured in the laboratory. This lack of capability restricts our knowledge of microbial genetics and community ecology. Metagenomics, the culture-independent cloning of environmental DNAs that are isolated directly from an environmental sample, has already provided a wealth of information about the uncultured microbial world. It has also facilitated the discovery of novel biocatalysts by allowing researchers to probe directly into a huge diversity of enzymes within natural microbial communities. Recent advances in these studies have led to a great interest in recruiting microbial enzymes for the development of environmentally-friendly industry. Although the metagenomics approach has many limitations, it is expected to provide not only scientific insights but also economic benefits, especially in industry. This review highlights the importance of metagenomics in mining microbial lipases, as an example, by using high-throughput techniques. In addition, we discuss challenges in the metagenomics as an important part of bioinformatics analysis in big data.

Enzymes in Fish and Seafood Processing

“…Accordingly, they have been extensively used in food production and processing for centuries, albeit in a rather empirical manner, which has been superseded by a rational approach in the last decades (Whitaker, 1994 ; Whitaker et al, 2002 ; Fraatz et al, 2014 ). In recent years, the focus has been on technical and scientific issues (enzyme formulations, molecular improvement of enzyme, screening for new/improved enzymes through traditional and metagenomics approaches, process improvement) as well as on legal and regulatory matters (definition of enzymes and technological purposes, procedures for safety assessment, harmonization of regulations, among others), all of these abridging the food industry (Fraatz et al, 2014 ; Li and Cirino, 2014 ; Alma’abadi et al, 2015 ; Jemli et al, 2016 ). Within this latter area, fish and seafood comprise a significant market (Morrissey and DeWitt, 2014 ), where enzyme action plays an effective role.…”

The Value and Significance of Metagenomics of Marine Environments

“…The article by Alma’abadi et al [19] reviewed marine metagenomes as a potential source for novel industrially-useful enzymes. With the advance of the next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and associated studies of metagenomes, we have now realized the extent of the unknown biocatalysts.…”

Harnessing Marine Biocatalytic Reservoirs for Green Chemistry Applications through Metagenomic Technologies

“…Counterintuitively, often low nutrient concentrations improve cultivation efficiencies [ 94 , 95 ]. Where culturability cannot be achieved, applying metagenomics to uncover novel enzymes can circumvent these difficulties and hence increase the chance of positive biocatalytic hits from complex samples [ 96 ].…”