Synthetic biology approaches to improve biocatalyst identification in metagenomic library screening

There is a growing demand for enzymes with improved catalytic performance or tolerance to process-specific parameters, and biotechnology plays a crucial role in the development of biocatalysts for use in industry, agriculture, medicine and energy generation. Metagenomics takes advantage of the wealth of genetic and biochemical diversity present in the genomes of microorganisms found in environmental samples, and provides a set of new technologies directed towards screening for new catalytic activities from environmental samples with potential biotechnology applications. However, biased and low level of expression of heterologous proteins in Escherichia coli together with the use of non-optimal cloning vectors for the construction of metagenomic libraries generally results in an extremely low success rate for enzyme identification. The bottleneck arising from inefficient screening of enzymatic activities has been addressed from several perspectives; however, the limitations related to biased expression in heterologous hosts cannot be overcome by using a single approach, but rather requires the synergetic implementation of multiple methodologies. Here, we review some of the principal constraints regarding the discovery of new enzymes in metagenomic libraries and discuss how these might be resolved by using synthetic biology methods.