Protein Engineering: A Powerful Tool for Optimizing Enzyme Performance

Protein engineering has emerged as a formidable tool for modulating the activity, thermostability, regioselectivity, and enantioselectivity of natural enzymes. Through the application of random mutations, semi-rational designs, and rational designs, laboratory evolution of enzymes has achieved remarkable success. However, in practical biotechnology applications, natural enzymes often fall short, leading to an increased demand for enhanced enzyme activity. Consequently, tailoring enzymes to improve their performance has become a highly valuable pursuit, driving extensive research in enzyme design and protein engineering.

The rapid advancement of computational methods and the explosive growth of computational power have synergistically propelled computational design into a powerful tool for obtaining tailor-made enzymes. Moreover, the development of computational methods that integrate different strategies can significantly augment the number of predicted effective mutations, facilitating the identification of optimal solutions within local sequence space with broader sampling. This, in turn, minimizes experimental effort and accelerates the enzyme evolution process.