Enzymatic Processes in Marine Biotechnology

In previous review articles the attention of the biocatalytically oriented scientific community towards the marine environment as a source of biocatalysts focused on the habitat-related properties of marine enzymes. Updates have already appeared in the literature, including marine examples of oxidoreductases, hydrolases, transferases, isomerases, ligases, and lyases ready for food and pharmaceutical applications. Here a new approach for searching the literature and presenting a more refined analysis is adopted with respect to previous surveys, centering the attention on the enzymatic process rather than on a single novel activity. Fields of applications are easily individuated: (i) the biorefinery value-chain, where the provision of biomass is one of the most important aspects, with aquaculture as the prominent sector; (ii) the food industry, where the interest in the marine domain is similarly developed to deal with the enzymatic procedures adopted in food manipulation; (iii) the selective and easy extraction/modification of structurally complex marine molecules, where enzymatic treatments are a recognized tool to improve efficiency and selectivity; and (iv) marine biomarkers and derived applications (bioremediation) in pollution monitoring are also included in that these studies could be of high significance for the appreciation of marine bioprocesses.