Enzyme design with remote effects
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - 12:56
in Physics & Chemistry
Engineers are unlikely to tinker with the cooling system if they want to increase the size of an engine. Yet chemists at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research have adopted an approach similar to this in their efforts to optimise an enzyme for practical applications. They substituted two amino acids at a site relatively distal to the biocatalyst's binding pocket, the location where the chemical reaction takes place.