Marine glycosyl hydrolases as tool for industrial application

Usually biocatalysts for industrial applications are required to possess optimum properties to adapt to the harsh conditions utilized. Discovering better enzymes in nature (bioprospecting) is one of the approach to overcome this problem. The biodiversity value of different natural environments has always been important and marine environment seems to be the most promising for the properties of marine biocatalysts linked to the habitat where they thrive. Salt tolerance, hyperthermostability, barophilicity and cold adaptivity are indeed properties of great interest for industry. Industrial applications of marine glycosyl hydrolases cover a broad range of individual sectors from biorefinery to food industry. Importance is also recognized to the biobased extraction or modification of structurally complex marine molecules, etc. Patents are a valuable source of technical scientific knowledge showing the current or past state of technology. Their analysis is capable of fully presenting the whole potential of a scientific topic with ready cases for industrial applications. A recent quick analysis of patents (2016-2017) in this field, as sorted from the Espacenet patent database, helped to point out that the literature in the scientific journals is at the moment, showing only a partial result of different applicative projects. In this chapter, an analysis of patents using a search engine of larger coverage such as Google patents (120 million patent publications from 100+ patent offices around the world) is reported as it has been adapted to a wider period from 2011 to 2019 and the results deeply analysed in detail. Different aspects are presented in tabulated forms and conclusions drawn for geographical origin of patenting activity and for scientific issues such as novelty of biocatalysts discovered, correlated in a field/polymer network map presented.