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Finding better protein engineering strategies

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Protein improvement strategies today involve widely varying combinations of rational design with random mutagenesis and screening. To make further progress—defined as making subsequent protein engineering problems easier to solve—protein engineers must critically compare these strategies and eliminate less effective ones.

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Figure 1: Protein engineering methods differ widely based on the degree that the enzyme is changed and the amount of information available for rational design.

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Acknowledgements

U.T.B. thanks the German Research Foundation (DFG, Grant Bo1862/4-1) and R.J.K. the US National Science Foundation (CHE-0616560) for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Romas J. Kazlauskas is in the Biotechnology Institute and Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology & Biophysics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA,

    Romas J Kazlauskas

  2. Department of Biotechnology & Enzyme Catalysis, Uwe T. Bornscheuer is in the Institute of Biochemistry, Greifswald University, Greifswald, Germany.,

    Uwe T Bornscheuer

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  1. Romas J Kazlauskas
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  2. Uwe T Bornscheuer
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Correspondence to Romas J Kazlauskas or Uwe T Bornscheuer.

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Kazlauskas, R., Bornscheuer, U. Finding better protein engineering strategies. Nat Chem Biol 5, 526–529 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio0809-526

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