According to news from the Feed Research Institute (FRI) of CAAS, the research achievement on ‘Creation of New-type Non-starch-polysaccharide (NSP)-degrading Enzymes as Feed Additives’ conducted by Dr. Yao Bin and his research team at the FRI won the first prize of 2013 Annual Beijing Science and Technology Award.

NSP is one of the anti-nutritional factors in animal feed. Supplementation of hydrolytic enzymes in feed can decrease the effect of these factors and increase feed conversion rate by 5-10%. Consequently, this practice can improve the efficiency of livestock production and reduce environmental contamination. After almost 10 years’ hard work, Dr. Yao and his team has developed a highly efficient platform to enrich the genetic resources of several NSP-degrading enzymes, characterize enzyme properties, assess their application potentials, and achieve high-yield production. These works make the production of novel NSP-degrading enzymes cost-effective and commercially valuable. Especially, the expression levels of different enzymes were increased by 25?81 folds, which was much higher than that reported. As a result, Dr. Yao’s team has removed the stumbling blocks in the feed enzyme field, including intellectual properties, cost, efficiency, and so on.

Dr. Yao’s team set up a new technology system, which can directly clone full-length genes and screen objective genes from environmental metagenomic or transcriptomic nuclear acid. Using these methods, more than 100 genes coding for NSP-degrading enzymes have been identified, which is advantageous over international genetic resources and intellectual properties. The enzymes showed different properties including high catalytic efficiency, thermophilic, acidophilic, or protease-resistance. Moreover, Dr. Yao’s team made great contributions in the structure and function relationship research of enzyme proteins. They constructed an efficient screening vector system based on extracellular fusion mutant proteins, optimized the protein engineering system for enzyme improvement, and obtained several improved enzymes with excellent properties and application potentials. Another great finding was identification of several key factors in Pichia expression system and verification of their function. Based on these knowledge, a high-yield expression system of 5?25 mg/mL was developed for large-scale, cost-effective production of enzymes, including xylanase, glucanase, mannannase, and α-galactosidase, which has topped a reputation of worldwide.

The achievements of this project are but not limited to: developing new feed resources, increasing feed utilization, making livestock production environment-friendly, improving the quality of animal products, 18 authorized patents, 65 SCI papers, 5 industrial standards, and close collaboration with more than 10 enzyme companies on industrialization and technology transfer.