title: Protein design in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.
abstract: Starting from experimental data on sequence, structure or biochemical properties of enzymes, protein design seeks to construct enzymes with desired activity, stability, specificity and selectivity. Two strategies are widely used to investigate sequence-structure-function relationships: statistical methods to analyse protein families or mutant libraries, and molecular modelling methods to study proteins and their interaction with ligands or substrates. On the basis of these methods, protein design has been successfully applied to fine-tune bottleneck enzymes in metabolic engineering and to design enzymes with new substrate spectra and new functions. However, constructing efficient metabolic pathways by integrating individual enzymes into a complex system is challenging. The field of synthetic biology is still in its infancy, but promising results have demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of the concept.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Technical Biochemistry, University of Stuttgart, Allmandring 31, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany. Juergen.Pleiss@itb.uni-stuttgart.de
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pleiss
mesh_terms: D001709:Biotechnology; D004798:Enzymes / Q000378:metabolism; D060847:Metabolic Engineering; D053858:Metabolic Networks and Pathways; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D058615:Synthetic Biology
chemical_list: D004798:Enzymes; D011506:Proteins