26 May 2022

Functional screening is an established approach to discover novel enzymes with desired activities, especially in the case of enzymes with no, or very few, known sequences or homologs, or in cases of very heterologous enzyme classes. Department of Biotechnology and nanomedicine, SINTEF Industry, throughout the years has established an extensive high throughput screening facility including state-of-the-art robotic systems for liquid handling and analytical analysis as well as the high-speed cell sorter MoFlo Astrios EQ equipping with four lasers and supporting up to 1536-well plates. Additionally, unique (meta)genomic libraries originated from exotic environments ranging from the high pressure, high temperature oil reservoirs to the cold, remote soils from Svalbard areas have been constructed at SINTEF providing a rich source of material for screening. Successful examples of assay development and novel enzymes identified by functional screening for industrial applications with the focus on (bio)polymer (lignocellulose, xylan, PET) degradation will be presented.