Biocatalysts: application and engineering for industrial purposes

Abstract

Enzymes are widely applied in various industrial applications and processes, including the food and beverage, animal feed, textile, detergent and medical industries. Enzymes screened from natural origins are often engineered before entering the market place because their native forms do not meet the requirements for industrial application. Protein engineering is concerned with the design and construction of novel enzymes with tailored functional properties, including stability, catalytic activity, reaction product inhibition and substrate specificity. Two broad approaches have been used for enzyme engineering, namely, rational design and directed evolution. The powerful and revolutionary techniques so far developed for protein engineering provide excellent opportunities for the design of industrial enzymes with specific properties and production of high-value products at lower production costs. The present review seeks to highlight the major fields of enzyme application and to provide an updated overview on previous protein engineering studies wherein natural enzymes were modified to meet the operational conditions required for industrial application.

• Bioengineering
• directed evolution
• industrial requirements
• protein design
• rational design
• semi-rational design
• tailor-made enzyme
• white biotechnology

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Mr. Anouar Smaoui and Mrs. Hanen Ben Salem for their valuable language polishing services.

Declaration of interest

Due to the large flow of studies on the subject under investigation, the authors would like to apologize for any work that they were not able to cite. Related projects in our laboratory are supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of High Education and Scientific Research of Tunisia. The authors report no declaration of interest.