Microbial Laccase Production and Its Industrial Applications

Abstract

Pollution remains a major problem to be dealt with. Laccase is multicopper oxidase enzyme belonging to the group of blue oxidases that are widely distributed among plants, insects, fungi, and bacteria. As pollution increases day by day, various industries mainly textile, pulp, and paper discharge huge quantity of waste in the environment, and the disposal of this waste is a big problem. Work has been done toward an enzyme, which can detoxify these wastes without harming the environment, and this increases the interest in its use to replace conventional non-biological methods. Laccase uses oxygen and produces water as by-product. Laccases have shown potential properties to act on a range of substrates and also to detoxify a range of pollutants which have made them to be usable for several purposes in many industries like for bleaching process in paper and pulp industries, scouring and decolorization in textile industries, dough making and softening in food industries, and clarification and removal of haze formation in beer, wine, and juices industries, as well as in bioremediation process for degradation of pesticides and herbicides and removal of toxic pollutant which are the major areas where laccase enzyme plays active role and become interesting area of research for researchers.