Enzymes maintain a range of protein sequences and diverse structural forms with activities that far exceed the best chemical catalysts. However, research on engineering them with new and improved features are limited due to technical inadequacies. In a new report now published in Nature Communications, Linfeng Xu and a research team in bioengineering, chemistry, and molecular biology at the University of California, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas, in the U.S., described a scalable approach to characterize enzyme activity using the metabolism of the host cell as a biosensor to understand product formation. The team then measured the metabolic pathways of different products via mass spectrometry and the results provided them a general path to sense product formation and discover unexpected results and map the effects of mutagenesis.
Click here for original story, Mapping enzyme catalysis with metabolic sensing
Source: Phys.org