Discovery Strategies for Aromatic Oxygenases from Environmental Microbes

Aromatic oxygenases,which can catalyze the hydroxylation of aromatic ring,have been widely used in bioremediation and chemical synthesis.In this paper,the classification and application area of aromatic oxygenases are summarized.Moreover,their discovery strategies based on pure culture technology and metagenomic technology are discussed in detail and first evaluated.Abundant of aromatic oxygenases have been obtained using pure culture technology,but these enzymes exhibit with single type,high repetition rate and low novelty.Emerging metagenomic technology provides new ideas for discovering microbial resource from uncultured microbes.However,it is still in the initial stage of exploiting aromatic oxygenases by metagenomic methods,and many problems such as low screening efficiency and hard to express heterologously have not been resolved.This review evaluates the two strategies by analyzing the content of genetic information,screening throughout and efficiency,the time consume,cost,and expression feasibility of aromatic oxygenase.And the metagenomic methods suitable for screening different types of aromatic oxygenases are proposed.In the future,pure culture and metagenomic technology combined with other omics technologies,will contribute to promoting the theoretical study of aromatic oxygenases and rapid development of biocatalysis industry.