Abstract
Biotechnology has almost unlimited potential to change our lives in very exciting ways. Many of the chemical reactions that produce these products can be fully optimized by performing them at extremes of temperature, pressure, salinity, and pH for efficient and cost-effective outcomes. Fortunately, there are many organisms (extremophiles) that thrive in extreme environments found in nature and offer an excellent source of replacement enzymes in lieu of mesophilic ones currently used in these processes. In this review, I discuss the current uses and some potential new applications of extremophiles and their products, including enzymes, in biotechnology.
Highlights
The impact of biotechnology on our lives is inescapable
This review initially focuses on the four success stories of extremozymes in biotechnology
Butanol is quite inhibiting to the growth of microorganisms compared with ethanol
Summary
The impact of biotechnology on our lives is inescapable. Some of these impacts are well publicized, like the process of generating biofuels. The efficiency of these enzymes is often improved through genetic and/or chemical modification[7,8] as well as immobilization strategies[9], all of which are designed to produce biocatalysts with improved properties such as increased activity and/or stability to use in specific industrial processes This can be a lengthy and (more importantly) costly enterprise, especially since nature provides many readily available alternatives in the form of extremozymes, which are found in organisms that thrive in extremes of temperature (as high as 122°C and as low as −12°C), pressure (as high as 1000 atm), salinity (up to and including saturating levels), and pH (from 0 to 6 and 8 to 12)[10,11,12,13,14,15]. Several microorganisms produce internal gas vesicles, small gas-filled proteinaceous structures, the best-studied coming from the halophilic archaea These structures have been engineered in Halobacterium species NRC-1 to generate a recombinant form that expresses portions of the simian immunodeficiency virus on the external surface[71]. Experiments using NRC-1’s polar lipids and recombinant gas vesicles as a nasal-delivered vaccine in mice were quite encouraging and showed no toxicity[71]
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