Conference Book of Abstracts - Taita Taveta University College

emarkable substrate diversity and stability has been used for the chemo-enzymatic epoxidationof vegetable oils and fatty acids in solvent-free medium. The resulting fatty epoxides are used asenvironment-friendly PVC stabilizers, plasticizers, cross-linkers in powder coatings, surfactantproduction and additives for lubricating oils [3].A number of novel biocatalysts have been obtained from metagenomes. An example is themetagenomic esterase from the deep-sea hypersaline anoxic basin which has been characterizedand found to be most active at alkaline pH [4]. Metagenomics has also greatly enhanced thediscovery of novel pharmaceutically important small molecules as reviewed by Steele et al [5].Indeed, the use of biocatalysts in industry has indeed increased exponentially over the last fewdecades. For examples, companies such as DSM (Netherlands), Lonza (Switzerland) and BASF(Germany) use enzymes in some of their industrial processes.However, in Kenya, there is very limited use of enzymes in industrial application, andmetagenomic derived biocatalysts are yet to be tapped from the unique ecological niches such asthe soda lakes and hot springs in Kenya. There is thus need for a concerted, multidisciplinaryeffort to address this issue.References[1] Anastas, P.T. and Warner, J.C., 1998. Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford UniversityPress.[2] Jaeger, K-E. and Eggert, T., (2002). Lipases for biotechnology. Current Opinions in Biotechnology 13: 390-397