Trend of hybrid enzyme design in the big data era

Abstract

The high efficiency and stability of enzymes are the basis for industrial application. Hybrid enzyme suitable for industrial applications could be constructed by many molecular biology technologies including tandem fusion, domain insertion and post-translational protein conjugation. However, the low expression and activity of hybrid enzyme limit its application in industrial production, and multifunctional design of a specific protein domain has been becoming a new trend. With the advent of high-throughput sequencing, biologists are starting to wrestling with massive data sets. Besides, the concept of protein sectors and co-evolution provides novel insight into the relationship of protein structure and function. The residues-covariation of a protein sector displays preference, which imparts functional diversity to different enzymes in the same family. The covariation-residues in specific protein sectors can be located based on the analysis of massive data, and then these functional residues can be assembled in a new enzyme variant using the biotechnology of synthetic biology, thus completing the redesign of natural enzymes. This indicates a new stage of designing hybrid enzyme, as well as the new trend of protein design in the era of biological big data.