European collaboration shines a light on enzyme discovery for industry
A European consortium has provided a disruptive technological breakthrough to allow the discovery and characterization of novel enzymes for industrial biotechnology. The technology will open the way to more efficient industrial processes such as in the biofuel, animal feed and paper and pulp industries.
The breakthrough – termed activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) – allows the immediate visualization of the activity of enzymes in complex samples secreted by wood-decaying fungi and bacteria, whose enzymes are central to many current and planned industrial processes.
Hard-to-characterise enzymes
The rise in genome sequencing has provided scientists with hundreds of thousands of DNA sequences for enzymes with potential societal and industrial use, but with limited ways to rapidly characterise their activity, function and role.
Such annotation is especially important for enzymes involved in plant polysaccharide degradation where digestion of these intractable materials, for example in biofuels, often demands enzymes are active under extreme reaction conditions.
Enzyme fingerprint
Their breakthrough has been the synthesis and application of a suite of coloured probes, which provide a rapid diagnostic fingerprint for different enzyme classes. The ‘flick of the switch’ method providing diagnosis of activity, specificity, and stability under any user-defined conditions using visible light allows, not only the discovery of new enzyme activities, but also the rapid assessment of their potential utility.
International research team
The team included scientists from the Universities of Leiden, York, Barcelona, and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research / University of Aix-Marseille. It applied technologies originally designed to use in clinical diagnosis of genetic disease and adapted these for industrial enzyme discovery.
Professor Gideon Davies, who led the York team, said: 'Activity-based probes have provided rapid diagnostic solutions for genetic disease, here we have developed the technology to allow the discovery and characterization of enzymes for biomass degradation, opening the way to more efficient industrial processes.'
And Professor Hermen Overkleeft, from Leiden University, added: 'It’s an exciting new application of activity-based protein profiling. We can now synthesise bespoke probes for key industrial processes where specific insight is needed into enzyme function and stability.
'Enzymatic solutions to societal and industrial challenges will benefit the planet considerably, and it’s great to be rolling out a transformative new technology in this arena.'
Funding
The work in Leiden was funded by Leiden University, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the European Research Council.
image above: Aspergillus niger, by Ebru Alazi
The work has been published in the American Chemical Society publication ACS Central Science, DOI 0.1021/acscentsci.9b00221.