SCREENING OF PROTEASE ENZYME BY CONSTRUCTION OF METAGENOMIC LIBRARY FROM MARINE SOIL SEDIMENTS

Nonetheless, the cultivable microorganisms constituting these resources correspond to only a small fraction of the microbial diversity less than 1% of the microorganisms in various environments are readily cultivable (Amann et al., 1995). This limits the range of a search for new biocatalysts for the bioprocess industry, so the use of complex communities and the effort to overcome the problem of noncultivability attract not only scientific attention but also biotechnological innovation. Methods have been developed and used toovercome the non-cultivability of environmental microorganisms for biotechnology, namely cloning and the expression of metagenomes in suitable expression hosts. Proteases are present in all living forms as they are involved in various metabolic processes. They are mainly involved in hydrolysis of the peptide bonds (Gupta et al., 2002). Proteases find a wide range of applications in food, pharmaceutical, leather and textile, detergent, diagnostics industries and also in waste management. In order to discover new proteases from metagenomiclibraries, we screened for proteolytic activity from a constructed metagenomic library by direct cloning of environmental DNA of large DNA inserts. A novel gene encoding proteolytic enzyme was picked up,sequenced, expressed in E. coli and characterized. Several microbial proteases from the culturable organisms have been characterized. However, very few proteases have been identified through culture independent metagenomic approach.