Industrial Biocatalysis: an Insight into Trends and Future Directions

Industrial biocatalysts are gaining popularity each day for the purpose of eco-friendliness, cost-effectiveness and long-term sustainability. However, finding a suitable biocatalyst for any particular process fulfilling these criteria is still a challenging task and has to be taken care of for upscaling of the process. Emerging technologies are being adopted for the betterment of the process involving biocatalysis in terms of process economics and efficiency in terms of yield and productivity. Various recent measures for finding suitable novel industrial biocatalysts and their improvement in properties using emerging techniques have been reviewed in this manuscript. Novel techniques focussing on biocatalytic-related areas in the recent times and their future prospects have been summarized.

Isolation of novel biocatalysts for industrial processes is still being considered as the deciding factor for efficient industrial production using enzymes. Metagenomics and classical ways of finding these catalysts for isolation and screening have not gone out of fashion. Immobilization on novel matrices and co-immobilization on novel matrices to overcome mass transfer limitation and for reducing the cost are very common in recent studies. Metabolic and genome mining for improvement and directed evolutions are also being used for generation of new-age catalysts improvement. Enzyme cascade, in silico studies and computational biology are upcoming areas related to biocatalysis.

Importance of industrial biocatalysis is limited by non-availability of efficient catalysts in terms of productivity, yield, cost-effectiveness and eco-friendliness. These are being removed gradually by finding the suitable candidate for catalysing these reactions. Classical and metagenomic isolation and screening of these efficient catalysts are presently in vogue but genome mining is the upcoming trend. Directed evolution, genome engineering and metabolic engineering are second steps considered for desired improvements in properties. Process optimization using various non-conventional solvents, immobilization on novel matrices, co-immobilization and multi-enzyme cascades are being done for improving economic efficiency. Further need for process sustainability and economic consideration are forcing researchers to take the route of in silico biology and high-level computational methods.