Potential biocatalysts originating from sea environments

This review is intended to give an account of the knowledge about known enzymes of marine origin described in literature thus stimulating future applications in biocatalysis that these biocatalysts can offer to a large spectra of end-users. The uniqueness of marine biocatalysts is not only based on habitat-related properties such as salt tolerance, hyperthermostability, barophilicity, cold adaptivity, etc. A marine enzyme in fact may carry more, e.g. novel chemical and stereochemical properties. This “chemical biodiversity” increases interest in this field; substrate specificity and affinity are evolved properties linked to the metabolic functions of the enzymes and to ecological asset related to the natural source and this is an important aspect in the bioprospecting for new biocatalysts. The importance of all examples reported should be sufficient to trigger the attention of the biocatalytically oriented scientific community towards marine environment as source of biocatalysts, and this could in turn enhance both new discovery and improvement of marine enzymes.