New cold-water enzymes from polar metagenomes

This project will pursue several approaches to identify new breakthrough enzymes for detergent and other applications: (1) the project will fully characterise an existing candidate enzyme and its structure/activity relationship, (2) new samples will be collected be mined to identify and produce new libraries of enzyme candidates and (3) lead molecules emerging from the above activities will be selected for homologue studies involving searches of public databases, the university's existing metagenomes to identify related molecules and produce a diverse panel of variants for characterisation and application testing. The most promising leads will be advanced to small-scale consumer research.