Enzymes for the laundry industries: tapping the vast metagenomic pool of alkaline proteases

In the wide field of laundry and cleaning applications, there is an unbroken need for novel detergent proteases excelling in high stability and activity and a suitable substrate range. We demonstrated the large amount of highly diverse subtilase sequences present in metagenomic DNA by recovering 57 non‐redundant subtilase sequence tags with degenerate primers. Furthermore, an activity‐ as well as a sequence homology‐based screening of metagenomic DNA libraries was carried out, using alkaline soil and habitat enrichments as a source of DNA. In this way, 18 diverse full‐length protease genes were recovered, sharing only 37–85% of their amino acid residues with already known protease genes. Active clones were biochemically characterized and subjected to a laundry application assay, leading to the identification of three promising detergent proteases. According to sequence similarity, two proteases (HP53 and HP70) can be classified as subtilases, while the third enzyme (HP23) belongs to chymotrypsin‐like S1 serine proteases, a class of enzymes that has not yet been described for the use in laundry and cleaning applications.