1. Protein engineers turned evolutionists—the quest for the optimal starting point
- Author
-
Devin L. Trudeau and Dan S. Tawfik
- Subjects
0106 biological sciences ,0303 health sciences ,Computer science ,Biomedical Engineering ,Computational Biology ,Proteins ,food and beverages ,Bioengineering ,Protein Engineering ,Directed evolution ,01 natural sciences ,Enzymes ,Evolution, Molecular ,03 medical and health sciences ,Natural sequence ,Molecular evolution ,010608 biotechnology ,Computational design ,Evolutionism ,Biochemical engineering ,Directed Molecular Evolution ,Phylogeny ,030304 developmental biology ,Biotechnology - Abstract
The advent of laboratory directed evolution yielded a fruitful crosstalk between the disciplines of molecular evolution and bio-engineering. Here, we outline recent developments in both disciplines with respect to how one can identify the best starting points for directed evolution, such that highly efficient and robust tailor-made enzymes can be obtained with minimal optimization. Directed evolution studies have highlighted essential features of engineer-able enzymes: highly stable, mutationally robust enzymes with the capacity to accept a broad range of substrates. Robust, evolvable enzymes can be inferred from the natural sequence record. Broad substrate spectrum relates to conformational plasticity and can also be predicted by phylogenetic analyses and/or by computational design. Overall, an increasingly powerful toolkit is becoming available for identifying optimal starting points including network analyses of enzyme superfamilies and other bioinformatics methods.
- Published
- 2019