Novozymes uses the best of nature’s amazing diversity to produce new industrial enzymes. By cloning the genes that produce the best enzymes into the most effective enzyme-producing microorganisms, we obtain the best of the natural world.
Novozymes has developed expression cloning as a fast and efficient technology for cloning enzymes.
Using this technology, enzymes obtained from fungi and other sources (for example, a cow’s rumen or an insect’s gut) can be cloned by isolating the common component of the organisms that holds all the information - mRNA.
The potential of expression cloning is amazing: Novozymes’ researchers are able to express almost any enzyme found in nature, in well known organisms such as baker’s yeast or in the filamentous fungus Aspergillus oryzae.
The researcher has to isolate the RNA from the fungus or microorganism that produces the given enzyme, or from an ecological niche where the enzyme is found. By means of an advanced process, a copy can be made from the RNA of the original gene that codes for the enzyme and then put into the host organism. The host organism will then produce the enzyme when the RNA is transcribed (read and deciphered) in the host organism. The enzyme produced can be detected by sensitive, simple and reliable enzyme tests.
Expression cloning has several advantages over standard cloning methods. Firstly, it does not require any knowledge of the enzymes to be cloned, eliminating the time-consuming enzyme purification, characterization and amino acid sequence determination steps. Secondly, the method allows simultaneous screening of the cDNA library for many different enzymes by applying different screening assays.
Novozymes has enormous potential through expression cloning to create new sustainable products. Within the last few years our research facilities throughout the world have cloned more than 300 enzyme genes
using expression cloning.