Genome Mining for New Enzyme Chemistry

A revolution in the field of biocatalysis has enabled scalable access to compounds of high societal values using enzymes. The construction of biocatalytic routes relies on the reservoir of available enzymatic transformations. A review of uncharacterized proteins predicted from genomic sequencing projects shows that a treasure trove of enzyme chemistry awaits to be uncovered. This Review highlights enzymatic transformations discovered through various genome mining methods and showcases their potential future applications in biocatalysis.