Enzyme Engineering: Current Trends and Future Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,

Biocatalysis, due to the recent progress in molecular biotechnology, has reached a particularly exciting point, leading to the appearance of a wide variety of novel enzymes with diverse applications and unique physicochemical properties, based on specialized methods for heterologous enzyme expression and engineering. In order to create new activities or improve existing ones (altered versions of naturally occurring proteins with novel or “tailor-made” properties), new enzyme structures may be designed and produced, based on protein engineering (able to modulate the specificity and stereoselectivity of enzymes).

As green catalysts, enzymes are also fully compatible with environmental and modern health-and-safety standards, being used not only in academia but also in industry (the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries for optically pure molecules, and the food and chemical industries). Enzyme engineering, based on physical modifications of proteins or modifications at the genetic level, can be used for improving the catalytic efficiencies, specificity and reaction scopes of enzymes for advanced biocatalytic applications. Microbial screening, using high-throughput-screening and the metagenomic analysis of uncultured microorganisms, is a simple and frequently used method for finding new biocatalysts with required properties.

In this Special Issue, we mainly focus on work dealing with the high-throughput screening approach for the discovery and engineering of biocatalysts for optimizing their production in integrated processes and for their extraction/purification

Prof. Rénato Froidevaux
Dr. Alexandra Cristina Blaga
Guest Editors

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• enzyme applications
• expression system
• gene
• molecular modification
• biocatalytic applications
• directed evolution
• rational design
• semirational design
• medium engineering
• Sources of novel enzymes
• Bioinformatics approaches for enzyme screening
• Robotizable technologies
• High-throughput screening of enzymes
• Microfluidic devices for enzyme assays
• Miniscale bioreactor technology
• High-throughput enzyme purification
• Molecular and biochemical characterization of enzymes