Recent Advances in Selection and Engineering of Biomass Degrading Enzymes

Plant biomass represents a renewable and practically inexhaustible bio resource for production of fuels and chemicals, and in the coming years it is considered to play the same role in human civilization as oil in 20th and beginning of the 21st century. For the last three decades, the production of first-generation liquid biofuels (mainly, ethanol from food crops in the USA and that from sugarcane in Brazil) has continuously grown [1]. Since 2012 an era of full-scale commercial facilities for production of second-generation biofuels, derived from lignocellulosic feedstock’s, began [1,2]. Enzymes, including cellulases, hemicellulases and auxiliary activities, are the most essential part of the second-generation biofuel technology [2,3]. Because of the recalcitrant nature of lignocellulosic biomass, demanding high enzyme loadings, much attention is paid in the laboratories worldwide to finding and selection of novel enzymes with higher activity, thermostability, less susceptibility to inhibition, etc., as well to engineering of already known enzymes in order to improve their properties.