Abstract
Natural product biosynthesis (NPB) is the Panda's Thumb of evolutionary biochemistry. Arm races between organisms, and ever-changing environments, result in relentless innovation. This review focusses on enzyme evolution in NPB. First, we review cases of de novo emergence, whereby a completely new enzymatic activity arose in a ligand-binding protein, or a new enzyme emerged including a completely new scaffold. Second, we briefly review the current models for enzyme evolution, and how they explain the inherent promiscuity of NPB enzymes and their tendency to produce multiple related products. We thus suggest that NPB enzymes a priori evolved to generate a specific product; they are, however, trapped in a multifunctional, generalist evolutionary state and thereby produce a diversity of products.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 147-154 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Current Opinion in Chemical Biology |
| Volume | 59 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:D.S.T. is the Nella and Leo Benoziyo Professor of Biochemistry. Funding by the Abney Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. L.N.G. acknowledges the funding support of the CONACYT (Mexico) grant #203740 and the Martin Kushner Fellowship, from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. The authors thank Wilfred van der Donk, Mikko Metsä- Ketelä, and Pablo Cruz-Morales for their insightful comments.
Funding Information:
D.S.T. is the Nella and Leo Benoziyo Professor of Biochemistry. Funding by the Abney Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. L.N.G. acknowledges the funding support of the CONACYT (Mexico) grant # 203740 and the Martin Kushner Fellowship, from the Weizmann Institute of Science , Israel. The authors thank Wilfred van der Donk, Mikko Metsä- Ketelä, and Pablo Cruz-Morales for their insightful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd
Keywords
- Chemical diversity
- Enzyme evolution
- Generalist
- Natural products biosynthesis
- Promiscuity