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High-throughput screening methods for nitrilases

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Abstract

Nitrilases have been widely acknowledged as important alternatives to chemical catalysts, as they have been proved to transform an immense variety of nitriles under mild conditions and often in a stereoselective or regioselective manner. In the discovery of new nitrilases to establish viable industrial processes, screening plays an important role in identifying which subset of candidates contains a nitrilase of interest from a collection of organisms, clone banks, or enzyme libraries. However, the traditional methods for evaluating the nitrilases are a time-consuming, laborious, and costly process and have been regarded as a bottleneck in developing these nitrilases as industrial biocatalysts. In the past few years, a number of high-throughput screening methods have been developed for rapid evaluation and identification of nitrilases. Here, we review the various methodologies developed for high-throughput screening of nitrilases and focus on their advantages and limitations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Bioorganic Synthesis of Zhejiang Province, College of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310014, People’s Republic of China

    Ya-Ping Xue, Yue-Kai Yang, Sheng-Zhi Lv, Zhi-Qiang Liu & Yu-Guo Zheng

  2. Engineering Research Center of Bioconversion and Biopurification of Ministry of Education, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310014, People’s Pepublic of China

    Ya-Ping Xue, Yue-Kai Yang, Sheng-Zhi Lv, Zhi-Qiang Liu & Yu-Guo Zheng

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  1. Ya-Ping Xue
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  2. Yue-Kai Yang
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  3. Sheng-Zhi Lv
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  4. Zhi-Qiang Liu
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  5. Yu-Guo Zheng
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Correspondence to Yu-Guo Zheng.

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This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31,170,761 and the National High Technology Research and Development Program (863 Program) (No. 2011AA02A210).

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Xue, YP., Yang, YK., Lv, SZ. et al. High-throughput screening methods for nitrilases. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 100, 3421–3432 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-016-7381-3

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