Chapter 11 - Emerging trends and future perspectives on enzyme prospection with reference to food processing

Abstract

Recently environmental friendly and sustainable production technologies are gaining attention in all bioprocessing industries. Apart from the care for environment, the sustainable technology has to be competitive in terms of cost and efficiency in process and downstream processing. Since the advent of modern biotechnology, various strategies have been employed by food processing industry. Basically, this led to use of microbial enzymes in various process for value addition, development of functional foods, conservation and quality improvement, etc. However, the need for enzymes with desirable properties such as thermostability, resistance, tolerance to pH variations, increased biocatalysis, and stability against organic solvents are increasing. This necessitates the need to look for molecular technologies for prospection of novel enzymes through gene screening, protein engineering, and enzyme designing. Emerging strategies using metagenomics, bioinformatic tools, viz., sequence homology, and de novo enzyme design can be useful in this regard. Although, molecular tools can provide new insights in this search, there remains bottlenecks in transferring the lab technology to bioprocess. Nonetheless, multidisciplinary approaches such as molecular biochemistry, genomics, and transcriptomics can aid in this process, and these emerging strategies in identifying novel enzymes with potential for use by food processing industry and their future perspectives will be discussed.