Abstract
Natural proteins are an important source of therapeutic agents and industrial enzymes. While many of them have the potential to be used as highly effective medical treatments for a wide range of diseases or as catalysts for conversion of a range of molecules into important product types required by modern society, problems associated with poor biophysical and biological properties have limited their applications. Engineering proteins with reduced side-effects and/or improved biophysical and biological properties is therefore of great importance. As a common protein modification, glycosylation has the capacity to greatly influence these properties. Over the past three decades, research from many disciplines has established the importance of glycoengineering in overcoming the limitations of proteins. In this review, we will summarize the methods that have been used to glycoengineer proteins and briefly discuss some representative examples of these methods, with the goal of providing a general overview of this research area.
Highlights
With the deepening of our understanding of biology, recombinant proteins have become an important class of biological macromolecules that are widely used in medicine, industry, agriculture, environmental protection, and other fields (Puetz and Wurm, 2019)
In addition to the glycoengineering method of adjusting the expression and activity of enzymes involved in glycan biosynthesis and the method of increasing the number of glycosylation sites, another commonly used method is metabolic glycoengineering, a technique that was developed almost thirty years ago where protein glycosylation can be altered by changing the concentrations of monosaccharides or nucleotide sugars in the culture media (Bailey, 1991; Gramer et al, 2011; Buettner et al, 2018; Agatemor et al, 2019)
Protein glycoengineering based on organic chemistry has some advantages, it has a big disadvantage, that is, organic synthesis of glycoproteins as a new technology has not been well optimized and currently, it can only be utilized by experienced researchers
Summary
With the deepening of our understanding of biology, recombinant proteins have become an important class of biological macromolecules that are widely used in medicine, industry, agriculture, environmental protection, and other fields (Puetz and Wurm, 2019). Compared with other types of PTMs and amino acid mutations, the greatest advantage of glycoengineering is that, when glycosylation sites and glycan structures are selected appropriately, this method is capable of simultaneously improving many different properties of proteins.
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