De Novo Protein Design in Respiration and Photosynthesis

Spectroscopic and Crystallographic Evidence for the Role of a Water-Containing H-Bond Network in Oxidase Activity of an Engineered Myoglobin

“…As a complementary approach to the studies of native enzymes and their synthetic models, use of small designed metallo­proteins and -peptides has shown remarkable success . For example, we have employed a “biosynthetic modeling” approach, based on a small natural protein scaffold, to gain fundamental understanding of sufficient features conferring oxidase activity, i.e., 4e – reduction of O 2 to H 2 O. , In contrast to native enzymes, such as HCOs, which are membrane proteins that are not easy to purify to homogeneity with high yields and contain other accessory metal sites that can complicate spectroscopic studies, biosynthetic models are simpler to synthesize and contain only the metal-binding site central to the enzymatic activity.…”