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Improvement of the activity and thermostability of l-threonine aldolase from Pseudomonas putida via tailoring of the active sites lining the binding pocket

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Abstract

l-threonine aldolases catalyze the conversion of glycine and aldehydes to synthesize β-hydroxy-α-amino acids with unsatisfactory enzyme activity. Here, we expressed the l-threonine aldolase from Pseudomonas putida KT2440 (l-PpTA) in Escherichia coli BL21 (DE3) and improved the activity and thermostability by protein engineering. Five amino acid residues (Ser10, His89, Asp93, Arg177, and Arg321) located in the substrate-binding pocket were selected and for mutation. Eight mutants (D93A, D93G, D93M, D93F, D93S, D93Q, D93Y and D93H) with increased enzyme activity were identified and their kcat/KM values showed about 1–7-fold higher than wild-type. Among all the variants, D93H showed the highest catalytic efficiency with 2925 and 4515 s−1 mM−1 of kcat/KM values toward l-threonine and l-allo-threonine, respectively. In addition, circular dichroism spectrum exhibited that the melting temperature of D93H (54.2 °C) was 5 °C higher than wild-type (49.2 °C). Molecular dynamics simulations illustrated that the D93H variant shortens the distance between the imidazole group of H93 and the hydroxyl group of substrate, which facilitated the proton extraction and promote the enzymatic reaction. This work affords a candidate for the synthesis of β-hydroxy-α-amino acids with improved catalytic efficiency and thermostability and provides structural insights into the l-TA family by protein engineering.

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Data availability

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This project was supported by the National Key research and Development Program of China (2018YFA0900302), the National Science Foundation of China (32271487, 31970045), the National First-class Discipline Program of Light Industry Technology and Engineering (LITE2018-12), the Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (111-2-06), and Top-notch Academic Programs Project of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Industrial Biotechnology of Ministry of Education and School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, 214122, People’s Republic of China

    Lihong Li, Rongzhen Zhang & Yan Xu

  2. Lab of Brewing Microbiology and Applied Enzymology, School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, 214122, People’s Republic of China

    Lihong Li, Rongzhen Zhang & Yan Xu

  3. Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, 21205, USA

    Wenchi Zhang

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  1. Lihong Li
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  2. Rongzhen Zhang
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  4. Yan Xu
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Contributions

All authors have their own contributions to this study. LL conducted the research and wrote the first draft. RZ guided the project and revised the manuscript. WZ and YX provided valuable advices and helped with data analysis.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rongzhen Zhang.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Li, L., Zhang, R., Zhang, W. et al. Improvement of the activity and thermostability of l-threonine aldolase from Pseudomonas putida via tailoring of the active sites lining the binding pocket. Syst Microbiol and Biomanuf 3, 440–448 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43393-023-00171-6

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