Secrets of enzyme evolution revealed by Australian study

0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Xinhua, April 27, 2018
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CANBERRA, April 27 (Xinhua) -- Australian researchers have unlocked the ability to engineer new enzymes for use in medicine and industry.

In a study published on Friday, a team from Australian National University (ANU) detailed how they retraced the evolutionary history of a modern enzyme.

The team, led by Ben Clifton, used a technique called ancestral protein construction.

"This technique allows us to resurrect, in a sense, proteins that have been extinct for millions of years, so they can be studied in the lab," Clifton said in an ANU media release on Friday.

Researchers studied an enzyme called cyclohexadienyl dehydratase, discovering the molecular processes that create new enzymes.

"Enzymes are proteins that are essential for life because of their ability to speed up specific chemical reactions," Clifton said.

"Understanding the evolutionary processes that create new enzymes is important because we can then mimic those processes to design or engineer enzymes for our own purposes in the biotechnology or pharmaceutical industries.

"Our work gives the most detailed example, to date, of a natural evolutionary process that can create an enzyme from scratch."

Up until now using enzymes in medicine or biotechnology proved difficult because they couldn't be engineered to do specific tasks.

"The big problem we face when engineering enzymes is first understanding of how they work, and how they can gain new functions," senior researcher Colin Jackson said.

"Previous studies on enzyme evolution have shown how it is possible for new enzymes to evolve from existing enzymes -- but we still knew very little about how enzymes evolved in the first place." Enditem

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