[Advances of metagenomics in discovering novel biocatalysts]

Microorganisms contain a large number of biocatalysts, which are of great potential in industrial applications. However, the traditional cultural approaches can obtain only less than 1% of microorganisms. As a culture-independent method, metagenomics is an advanced solution by means of extracting all microbial genomic DNAs in certain environmental habitat, constructing and screening metagenomic libraries to seek novel functional genes. It serves as an effective tool for studying these uncultured microorganisms. Therefore, mining novel biocatalysts from metagenome has drawn the attention of researchers in the world. In this paper, environment sample category, genomic DNA extraction, library construction and screening strategies were reviewed. Recent examples of isolated biocatalysts from metagenomic libraries were presented. Future research directions of metagenomics were also discussed.