Microorganisms contain a large number of biocatalysts, which are of great potential in industrial applications. However, the traditional cultural approaches can obtain only less than 1% of microorganisms. As a culture-independent method, metagenomics is an advanced solution by means of extracting all microbial genomic DNAs in certain environmental habitat, constructing and screening metagenomic libraries to seek novel functional genes. It serves as an effective tool for studying these uncultured microorganisms. Therefore, mining novel biocatalysts from metagenome has drawn the attention of researchers in the world. In this paper, environment sample category, genomic DNA extraction, library construction and screening strategies were reviewed. Recent examples of isolated biocatalysts from metagenomic libraries were presented. Future research directions of metagenomics were also discussed.%微生物蕴藏着大量具有工业应用潜力的生物催化剂.然而,传统培养方法只能从环境中获得不到1％的微生物.宏基因组学是通过提取某一特定环境中的所有微生物基因组DNA、构建基因组文库并对文库进行筛选,寻找和发现新的功能基因的一种方法.它绕过了微生物分离培养过程,成为研究环境样品中不可培养微生物的有力手段.因此,从宏基因组中挖掘新型生物催化剂一直倍受生物学家的关注.以下主要对宏基因组文库的样品来源、DNA 提取方法、文库的构建和筛选策略的选择这4个方面的研究状况进行了综述,列举了近年来利用宏基因组技术所获得的新型生物催化剂,并对其今后的研究方向提出了展望.
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