Zooming in on Metagenomics: Lessons for Enzyme Engineering

Industrial “white” biotechnology is regarded as a key technology in modern industrialized societies for ensuring a sustainable economic future. It combines efficiency, the use of renewable resources and environmental friendliness to produce high-value products. In this respect, enzymes play a significant role being either product constituents themselves or serving as in vitro or in vivo biocatalysts.

More than 2 decades ago, the metagenome has been identified as a promising and virtually unlimited source of industrial enzymes. While the view of the metagenome tended to be a rather static one, the plasticity of this genomic resource is now being more and more perceived. The composition of microbial communities, for instance, changes during the course of the year according to variations in temperature, humidity and nutrients. Furthermore, genes are transferred, recombined and mutated by physicochemical or genetic processes – a phenomenon called evolution.

From an enzyme engineers point of view this observation raises the question of how to make use of this phenomenon in the quest for the “ideal” enzyme for a given biocatalytic process. This presentation will highlight some topical approaches for harvesting tailor-made enzymes from the metagenome and for using metagenomic information in the design of optimized enzyme catalysts.