Improving the thermal stability of Proteus mirabilis lipase based on multiple computational design strategies / 生物工程学报

Proteus mirabilis lipase (PML) features tolerance to organic solvents and great potential for biodiesel synthesis. However, the thermal stability of the enzyme needs to be improved before it can be used industrially. Various computational design strategies are emerging methods for the modification of enzyme thermal stability. In this paper, the complementary algorithm-based ABACUS, PROSS, and FoldX were employed for positive selection of PML mutations, and their pairwise intersections were further subjected to negative selection by PSSM and GREMLIN to narrow the mutation library. Thereby, 18 potential single-point mutants were screened out. According to experimental verification, 7 mutants had melting temperature (Tm) improved, and the ΔTm of K208G and G206D was the highest, which was 3.75 ℃ and 3.21 ℃, respectively. Five mutants with activity higher than the wild type (WT) were selected for combination by greedy accumulation. Finally, the Tm of the five-point combination mutant M10 increased by 10.63 ℃, and the relative activity was 140% that of the WT. K208G and G206D exhibited certain epistasis during the combination, which made a major contribution to the improvement of the thermal stability of M10. Molecular dynamics simulation indicated that new forces were generated at and around the mutation sites, and the rearrangement of forces near G206D/K208G might stabilize the Ca2+ binding site which played a key role in the stabilization of PML. This study provides an efficient and user-friendly computational design scheme for the thermal stability modification of natural enzymes and lays a foundation for the modification of PML and the expansion of its industrial applications.

High frequency of auxotrophy in clinical isolates of Proteus mirabilis harboring an R plasmid

We report a novel phenomenon of high genetic instability, related to auxotrophy, in strains of Proteus mirabilis. Among P. mirabilis strains harboring the R plasmid Kept in our laboratory collection, and some freshly isolated strians from clinical material, 54 per cent of the samples presented auxotrophy at frequencies higher than 10(-3). Prototrophic closes gave rise to auxotrophic ones at frequencies not explainable by the usual mutation mechanisms. The instability mainly affected the carbamoyl phosphate synthetase gene (car), which leads to a double requirement for arginine and uracil for growth in minimal medium. Other genes were also affected, at a lower frequency. The car mutation does not revert to prototrophy. A similar phenomenon of instability was induced in Escherichia coli strain HB 101 upon introduction of a drug-resistance plasmid from P. mirabilis. We have ruled out the hypothesis of a transposon in the generation of auxotrophy.