3.10 Emerging Enzymes

Abstract

The broad application of enzymes in industry is still impeded by the limited repertoire of available enzymes. New applications of biocatalysts in a sustainable bio-based economy, especially for employment in bioremediation, bioenergy, and bioproducts, appear to be the driving force behind the increased prevalence of novel enzymatic catalysts. Advances in synthetic biology, enzyme engineering, de novo enzyme (re)design, exploitation of enzyme promiscuity, and DNA sequencing technologies show great potential to facilitate the development of more efficient enzymes. Combined efforts would have the following benefits: an increased range of biocatalysts with different catalytic activities would be available and more biocatalysts with improved characteristics suitable for (bio)synthetic chemistry approaches would be discovered. This chapter demonstrates the potential of enzymes that have been investigated recently, but not yet fully exploited, for applications in chemical synthesis: nitrile reductases, sulfatases, phenol-coupling monooxygenases, squalene hopene cyclases, and aldoxime dehydratases. Examples of emerging enzymes and microorganisms that have been studied over the last few years and that have acquired scientific as well as industrial interest are described to illustrate the synthetic potential of these biocatalysts.The screening reactions were run in UV star 96-well plates using recombinant His-tagged enzymes purified via nickel affinity chromatography. The following conditions were applied: nitrile reductase (45 ìM, purity >85%) in buffer [100 mM Tris, 50 mM KCl, 1.15 mM 3.10.