Approaches for novel enzyme discovery from marine environments

Abstract

The enormous pool of biodiversity in marine ecosystems is an excellent natural reservoir for acquiring an inventory of enzymes with potential for biotechnological applications. Moreover, the opportunity for sustainable resource management has been greatly enhanced by recent advances in culturing methods for recalcitrant microbes. In this review, we will focus primarily on successful examples in culturing marine microbes and provide an overview of work examining the biotechnological potential of the marine reservoir, mainly through genomic strategies, such as activity-based functional screening of genomic and metagenomic libraries and homology-driven screening of enormous amounts of sequence data.