Abstract: Lipases are ubiquitous in animals, plants and microorganisms, but industrial lipases are mainly produced by microorganisms. The industrial application of lipases is constrained by its high cost and enzymatic characteristics such as temperature and pH tolerance, specific activity, substrate specificity and solvent resistance. Despite the abundance of information regarding microbial lipase genes and proteins, there are currently very few commercial lipase preparations that are suitable for application in the food, pharmaceutical and energy industries. Accordingly, tremendous research efforts have been made to mine novel alternative lipase resources. This article mainly presents a review of the approaches used to mine microbial lipase resources including environmental screening and metagenomics screening for mining new lipases with good properties, genetic improvement of lipase-producing strains, recombinant expression of lipases in genetically engineered strains, lipase modification by protein engineering, lipase immobilization and optimization of reaction conditions of immobilized lipase.

Key words: microbial lipase, resource mining, environmental screening, recombinant expression, protein engineering