In recent years, the marine environment has been the subject of increasing attention from
biotechnological and pharmaceutical industries as a valuable and promising source of novel bioactive
compounds. Marine biodiscovery programmes have begun to reveal the extent of novel compounds
encoded within the enormous bacterial richness and diversity of the marine ecosystem. A combination
of unique physicochemical properties and spatial niche-specific substrates, in wide-ranging and
extreme habitats, underscores the potential of the marine environment to deliver on functionally
novel biocatalytic activities. With the growing need for green alternatives to industrial processes,
and the unique transformations which nature is capable of performing, marine biocatalysts have the
potential to markedly improve current industrial pipelines. Furthermore, biocatalysts are known to
possess chiral selectivity and specificity, a key focus of pharmaceutical drug design. In this review,
we discuss how the explosion in genomics based sequence analysis, allied with parallel developments
in synthetic and molecular biology, have the potential to fast-track the discovery and subsequent
improvement of a new generation of marine biocatalysts
