“…Our recent study showed that the amino acid sequence of Bacillus kaustophilus LAP (BkLAP) has a very high similarity to those of BlLAP and EcPep (Lin et al , 2004), and therefore it is expected that they might possess similar structural scaffolds. In fact, residues Lys‐250, Asp‐255, Lys‐262, Asp‐273, Asp‐332, Glu‐334 and Arg‐336 implicated in zinc coordination and catalytic reaction of BlLAP are conserved in BkLAP and the corresponding residues, Lys‐265, Asp‐270, Lys‐277, Asp‐288, Asp‐347, Glu‐349 and Arg‐351, have been shown to be important for the catalytic reaction of the enzyme (Chi et al , 2004). To understand further the structure–function relationship for BkLAP, a site‐directed mutagenesis strategy was pursued to characterize the role of Thr‐346 and Leu‐352 residues located in the vicinity of the enzyme active site.…”