Novel enzyme diversity for improving cleaning and hygiene

人体每天产生多达克量的皮脂，这些皮脂沉积在我们的衣服上。添加到许多洗衣粉中的常见酶是蛋白酶和脂肪酶，用于消化洗涤面料上的蛋白质和脂肪。皮脂含有游离脂肪酸、甘油三酯和胆固醇酯、蜡酯和角鲨烯的复杂混合物。洗涤后大部分残留在衣服上。此外，还需要去除抗药性污渍，如茶渍，如果不对织物进行漂白，这些污渍就很难去除。自然界中存在的其他酶活性可以分解这些其他产品，也有漂白效果的酶。该项目的目标是从从全球高温环境中分离出来的大量DNA资源中鉴定和表征这些酶。可以使用生物信息学技术来挖掘这种资源，以确定将解决这些清洁问题的酶类。这将允许生产少量的新的强健的酶，供合作伙伴联合利华公司测试。此外，还建立了来自不同嗜热基因组的小片段DNA文库，作为筛选酶活性的文库，也就是特定的脂肪酸集。整个项目将允许获得新的稳定的新酶，这些酶可用于改善整个清洁过程。在这些过程中使用酶对环境友好，并避免使用刺激性的漂白剂。

The human body produces up to gram quantities each day of sebum that is deposited on our clothes. The commonenzymes added to many washing powders are protease and lipase enzymes to digest the proteins and lipids on the washfabric. The sebum contains a complex mixture of free fatty acids, triglycerides and cholesterol esters, wax esters, andsqualene. much of which remains on the clothes after the wash. In addition there is a need to remove resistant stains suchas tea stains which are difficult to remove without some bleaching of the fabric.The are other enzyme activities which exist in nature that can breakdown these other products and also enzymes whichhave a bleaching effect.The project will aim to identify and characterise these enzymes from a large DNA resource that has been isolated from hotenvironments around the globe. This resource can be mined using bioinformatic techniques to identify enzyme classes thatwill tackle these cleaning problems. This will allow the production of small amounts of the new robust enzymes to beproduced for testing at the partner company, Unilever. In addition libraries of small pieces of DNA from differentthermophilic genomes have be made as libraries that can be screening for activity of the enzymes again specific fatty acidsetc. The overall project will allow access to novel stable new enzymes that could be used to improve the overall cleaningprocess.The use of enzymes in these processes is environmentally friendly and avoids the use of harsh bleaching agents.