Functional-based screening methods for lipases, esterases, and phospholipases in metagenomic libraries.

The use of metagenomic techniques for enzyme discovery constitutes a powerful approach. Functional screens, in contrast to sequence homology search, enable us to select enzymes based on their activity. It is noteworthy that they additionally guarantee the identification of genes coding for enzymes that exhibited no sequence similarity to known counterparts from public databases and that even do not match any putative catalytic residues, involved in the selected catalytic function. Therefore, this strategy not only provides new enzymes for new biotechnological applications, but also allows functional assignment of many proteins, found in abundance in the databases, currently designated as "hypothetical" or "conserved hypothetical" proteins. In the past decade, there has been an exponential increase in the design of functional screening programmes, the majority of them established for hydrolases and oxidoreductases. Here, functional screening methods that guarantee the greatest enzyme diversity, for mining esterases and lipases, are described.