Soil metagenomics: a prospective approach for novel enzyme discovery

The development of metagenomics has emerged as an alternative approach for the conventional screening of microbial genomes from the natural environment. Metagenomic analysis provides broad information on the structure, composition and gene functions of various environmental microbes. It has been successfully applied to screen novel enzymes from the uncultured microbes in the environment. The soil metagenomic approach relies on the direct isolation of environmental DNA. The main application depends on the construction of a metagenomic library in a suitable vector and host with subsequent high-throughput screening. This review focuses on the metagenomic approach for exploring novel enzyme discovery.