Lab-on-a Chip Expands Functional Studies of Enzyme Variants
July 22, 2021
A microfluidic platform for high-throughput expression, purification, and characterization of enzyme variants has been applied to the study of a familiar enzyme, PafA (phosphate-irrepressible alkaline phosphatase of Flavobacterium). [Daniel Mokhtari, Stamford University]
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Just because an enzyme has an active site doesn’t mean the rest of the enzyme should be disregarded, as though it were so much dead weight. It influences enzyme function, if only by keeping the enzyme from unraveling and losing its function altogether. The rest of the enzyme may also fine-tune enzyme function in ways that are rather more subtle—too subtle, alas, to be determined without the patient study of enzyme variants, that is, versions of the enzyme that incorporate one or more mutations. Because studying how mutations affect enzyme function is such a painstaking business, the mutations that are assessed tend to be close to—you guessed it—the active site.