Commentary: polymer binding modules accelerate enzymatic degradation of poly(ethylene terephthalate) / 生物工程学报

The large scale production and indiscriminate use of plastics led to serious environmental pollution. To reduce the negative effects of plastics waste on the environment, an approach of enzymatic degradation was put forward to catalyze plastics degradation. Protein engineering strategies have been applied to improve the plastics degrading enzyme properties such as activity and thermal stability. In addition, polymer binding modules were found to accelerate the enzymatic degradation of plastics. In this article, we introduced a recent work published in Chem Catalysis, which studied the role of binding modules in enzymatic hydrolysis of poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) at high-solids loadings. Graham et al. found that binding modules accelerated PET enzymatic degradation at low PET loading (< 10 wt%) and the enhanced degradation cannot be observed at high PET loading (10 wt%-20 wt%). This work is beneficial for the industrial application of polymer binding modules in plastics degradation.

Engineering the 182 site of cyclodextrin glucosyltransferase for glycosylated genistein synthesis / 生物工程学报

Genistein and its monoglucoside derivatives play important roles in food and pharmaceuticals fields, whereas their applications are limited by the low water solubility. Glycosylation is regarded as one of the effective approaches to improve water solubility. In this paper, the glycosylation of sophoricoside (genistein monoglucoside) was investigated using a cyclodextrin glucosyltransferase from Penibacillus macerans (PmCGTase). Saturation mutagenesis of D182 from PmCGTase was carried out. Compared with the wild-type (WT), the variant D182C showed a 13.42% higher conversion ratio. Moreover, the main products sophoricoside monoglucoside, sophoricoside diglucoside, and sophoricoside triglucoside of the variant D182C increased by 39.35%, 56.05% and 64.81% compared with that of the WT, respectively. Enzymatic characterization showed that the enzyme activities (cyclization, hydrolysis, disproportionation) of the variant D182C were higher than that of the WT, and the optimal pH and temperature of the variant D182C were 6 and 40℃, respectively. Kinetics analysis showed the variant D182C has a lower Km value and a higher kcat/Km value than that of the WT, indicating the variant D182C has enhanced affinity to substrate. Structure modeling and docking analysis demonstrated that the improved glycosylation efficiency of the variant D182C may be attributed to the increased interactions between residues and substrate.

Improving maltodextrin specificity by site-saturation engineering of subsite +1 in cyclodextrin glycosyltransferase from Paenibacillus macerans / 生物工程学报

By engineering the subsite +1 of cyclodextrin glycosyltransferase (CGTase) from Paenibacillus macerans, we improved its maltodextrin specificity for 2-O-D-glucopyranosyl-L-ascorbic acid (AA-2G) synthesis. Specifically, we conducted site-saturation mutagenesis on Leu194, Ala230, and His233 in subsite +1 separately and gained 3 mutants L194N (leucine --> asparagine), A230D (alanine --> aspartic acid), and H233E (histidine --> glutamic acid) produced higher AA-2G yield than the wild-type and the other mutant CGTases. Therefore, the 3 mutants L194N, A230D, and H233E were further used to construct the double and triple mutations. Among the 7 obtained combinational mutants, the triple mutant L194N/A230D/H233E produced the highest AA-2G titer of 1.95 g/L, which was increased by 62.5% compared with that produced by the wild-type CGTase. Then, we modeled the reaction kinetics of all the mutants and found a substrate inhibition by high titer of L-AA for the mutants. The optimal temperature, pH, and reaction time of all the mutants were also determined. The structure modeling indicated that the enhanced maltodextrin specificity may be related with the changes of hydrogen bonding interactions between the side chain of residue at the three positions (194, 230 and 233) and the substrate sugars.