A Cloning of Novel Esterase from a Metagenomic Library

A novel esterase showing high enantioselectivity to (S)-ketoprofen ethyl ester was selected from fosmid environmental DNA library which is provided by Microbial Genomic & Applications Center. As a result of Blast search, the gene wasn't registerated in Gene Bank yet. And as we know, conserved domain region of esterase , G-X-S-X-G, wasn't discovered.$^{4)}$ And it is similar to Beta-lactamase. The DNA sequence of cloned esterase include an open reading frame consisting of 1170 bp, designated as EST-Y29, encoding a protein of 389 amino acids with a molecular mass of about 42.8 kDa. And amino acid sequence analysis revealed only a few identity (28%) to tile known esterases/lipases in the databases containing the conserved sequence motifs of esterases/lipases. when being comparison to other esterase revealed , this enzyme seems to be classified as a new member of esterase family. EST-Y29 was functionally overexpressed in a soluble form in E. coli with maximum conversion yield of (S)-ketoprofen at $65^{\circ}C$. This study demonstrates that functional screening combined with the sequential uses of restriction enzymes to exclude already known enzymes is a useful approach for isolating novel enzyme from a metagenome.