Persil the ""work of the washboard""—saving consumers time and rendering the historic method of "sun-bleaching" (by laying clothes out in the sun) unnecessary. Persil was the first commercially available self-activated laundry detergent (combining bleach with the detergent). The invention of Persil was a significant breakthrough. The name, "Persil", is derived from two of the original ingredients, sodium perborate and silicate. The original name was deemed unsuitable as an international brand because it is hard to pronounce in some languages. Coincidentally, "persil" is the French word for the herb, parsley. Persil is sold in powder, liquid detergent, liquid capsule, liqui-gel, and tablet
Commercially useful enzymes Commercially useful enzymes Commercially useful enzymes (CUEs) are enzymes which have commercial uses. Microbial enzymes have well-known applications as biocatalysts in several areas of industry, such as biotechnology, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, etc. Metagenomic data provide a unique resource for discovering novel commercially useful enzymes (CUEs) from yet unidentified microbes belonging to complex microbial communities in diverse ecosystems. A set of 510 CUEs was manually curated using publicly available information and classified into nine broad application categories based on their function. By comprehensive homology-based mining of ten diverse publicly available metagenomic data sources, several novel CUEs, homologous to those in the set