Foreword

Enzymes play a crucial role in all living organisms, being the best chemists that nature has “invented” (from the evolutionary viewpoint, of course). In the last decades these catalysts started to be used more and more in industrial, biotechnological processes, due to the fact that all chemical processes which normally need extreme conditions (high temperature and/or pressure, extremely acidic or alkaline media, etc.) can be done in much milder conditions, at temperatures of 25-40 °C, almost neutral pH, and in water as solvent. Considering the huge number of enzymes known so far and the new ones which are constantly being discovered and characterized in organisms all over the phylogenetic tree (e.g., extremophiles, Archaea, etc), it is no wonder that biotechnologies that use them extensively have grown exponentially in the last period.

In this context, I was delighted to read “Methods to Determine Enzymatic Activity”, edited by Alane Beatriz Vermelho and Sonia Couri, which comprises a nice collection of 13 reviews, all of them from Brazilian scientists, dealing with these topics. Each chapter presents in a very nice manner the main reaction(s) catalyzed by the considered enzyme, its sources, purification, characteristics, followed by the detailed description of the assay methods used to determine the activity (as well as inhibition/activation) of these enzymes. Many representatives are taken into consideration, such as pectinases, peroxidases, enzymes with chitinolytic activity, cellulases, amylases, xylanases, lipases, phenoloxidases, transglutaminases, keratinases, peptidases (mainly serine and metallo-proteinases are considered), tannases and ureases. Most of these enzymes have important applications in the food, textile, leather, biofuel production, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, fine chemicals, biomaterials, paper/cellulose, and detergent industries.

The Editors and the authors did an excellent work in presenting in an exhaustive and highly professional way the state-of-the-art in all these field. I warmly recommend this eBook to students, researchers and scientists from diverse fields, as due to the simplicity in which the material is presented, they will be able to resolve in a quick way some research problems related to assay methods of enzymes with many applications in biotechnology.