Enzymes for the laundry industries: tapping the vast metagenomic pool of alkaline proteases.

ABSTRACT: In the wide field of laundry and cleaning applications, there is an unbroken need for novel detergent proteases excelling in high stability and activity and a suitable substrate range. We demonstrated the large amount of highly diverse subtilase sequences present in metagenomic DNA by recovering 57 non-redundant subtilase sequence tags with degenerate primers. Furthermore, an activity- as well as a sequence homology-based screening of metagenomic DNA libraries was carried out, using alkaline soil and habitat enrichments as a source of DNA. In this way, 18 diverse full-length protease genes were recovered, sharing only 37-85% of their amino acid residues with already known protease genes. Active clones were biochemically characterized and subjected to a laundry application assay, leading to

SUBMITTER: Niehaus F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3815412 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature