In recent years, a lot of progress has been made related to the engineering of enzymes for functionalization, processing and degradation of non-natural polymers. Especially for polyesterases it has been shown that, apart from the active site architecture, sorption properties to their polymeric substrates are important targets for engineering. Rationale enzyme-engineering strategies led to remarkable enhancement of hydrolytic activities and clearly showed that the affinity between the enzyme and the polymeric substrates plays a key role in the enzymatic hydrolysis of synthetic polyesters. Here, different strategies for polyesterase engineering are presented, including fusion of different binding modules to catalytic domains, engineering of the enzyme surface or incorporation of non-canonical amino acids.

Adapting enzymes to non-natural polymeric substrates

254th National Meeting (2017)

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