Using molecular techniques to identify new microbial biocatalysts

Evolution has favoured microorganisms that produce efficient enzymes with substrate-adapted biocatalytic activities. Progress in molecular techniques, especially expression cloning, molecular screening, protein engineering and in vivo and in vitro shuffling, have paved the way for greater speed and accuracy in cloning enzyme genes from microorganisms and generating versions with improved properties. Recently, two new approaches have been added: screening directly from uncultivated microorganisms and generating additional hits by database mining using bioinformatic tools.