Glycosidases from sea: factual account and biological prospecting

The recent successes of marine biotechnology (development of new methods for in-sea aquaculture of marine inverterbrates, advances of genetic engineering of marine organisms) have allowed, and probably will more in future, the advancement of practical and economically viable ways for the production of enzymes from sea organisms, instead of environmentally destructive large-scale natural collections of marine biomasses. The marine environment has shown to be very interesting for the isolation of new glycosyl hydrolases. For these enzymes attention was focused mainly on the hydrolytic capability and selectivity since historically structural identification efforts faced the complexity of oligosaccharide and/or other natural products chemical structures. Glycosyl hydrolases from sea have proved to be valuable not only for their very selective hydrolytic potential but also in the synthesis of glycosidic linkage. In the expanding world of carbohydrate-active enzymes the discovery of thousands of glycosyltransferase and glycosyl hydrolase open reading frames has been estimated for the next years. In this context biodiversity of the sea environment will surely play an important role as a source of biotechnologically relevant biocatalysts.