protein engineering approach, catalysis with enzymes, i.e., biocatalysis, has emerged as the most powerful technology for widespread industrial applications by minimizing waste, reducing energy necessities, and increasing catalytic reactions (Sheldon et al., 2020;Wu et al., 2021). Enzymes are highly efficient, biocompatible, and biodegradable catalysts and are likely to be produced from bio-renewable resources. In contrast to chemical catalysts, enzymatic reactions are carried out at nearly ambient pressures and temperatures at physiological pH, leading to high reaction rates and selectivity.Moreover, protection or activation of functional groups is not required, and enzymemediated biocatalytic processes are atom and step economic, resulting in minimal waste and energy consumption than traditional counterparts. To sum up, biocatalytic processes are more economical, sustainable and possess a lower environmental footprint compared to conventional traditional processes for manufacturing commodity chemicals (Sheldon et al., 2021).Therefore, enzymes have gained booming importance for producing valuable chemicals, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, fuels, and other commodity bio-products in industrial processes. Nevertheless, the fragile nature of native enzymes prevents their utilization under challenging environments, where the industrial bioprocesses generally execute, causing low activity and inadequate stability. A number of approaches, including enzyme immobilization, chemical modifications, Integrated chemo-and biocatalysis, and designing (micro)environments for biocatalysts, have become the rapidly expanding areas of research to develop industrial biocatalysts with aggrandized stabilities, exquisite selectivities, and special activities with non-natural substrates in the unfavourable milieu of high temperatures and elevated substrate concentrations (Ren et al., 2019). In the last two decades, biocatalysis has witnessed immense progress and phenomenal growth for transforming into a mature technology with a vast industrial perspective. This development was mainly attributed to the advances in genomics, biochemistry, bioinformatics, synthetic biology, protein engineering, and other computational tools (Bilal et al., 2019).In total, 7 articles were published in this Research Topic summarizing various aspects of enzymes like identification, characterization, improving catalytic attributes and applications in multiple sectors. These were not explicitly focused on a specific domain and relatively more comprehensively, connecting new enzymes' exploration with their biocatalytic applications.
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The listed author(s) declare no conflict of interest in any capacity, including competing or financial.
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