Engineering productive enzyme confinement.
Natural enzymes were selected to function inside the cell, not in the test tube; therefore, their performance is optimized for the crowded conditions encountered in vivo. Most man-made matrices for enzyme confinement lead to suboptimal catalytic activity. Ackerman and colleagues showed that an entrapping environment consisting of functionalized mesoporous silica actually enhances enzyme activity beyond the test-tube levels of free enzymes in solution. These findings provide an approach for dissecting the effect of various contributors to enzyme activity and thereby provide a means for fine-tuning the entrapping matrices to optimize enzyme performance in a rational way.
Dunker
A Keith
AK
Center for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Indiana University School of Medicine, 410 W. 10th Street, Suite 5000, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA.
Fernández
Ariel
A
D001698:Biomedical Engineering / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends*; D002384:Catalysis; D004789:Enzyme Activation; D004800:Enzymes, Immobilized / Q000737:chemistry*; D049329:Nanostructures / Q000737:chemistry*
D004800:Enzymes, Immobilized