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Merck

Fluorescent assay for directed evolution of perhydrolases.

Journal of biomolecular screening (2012-03-07)
Dragana Despotovic, Ljubica Vojcic, Radivoje Prodanovic, Ronny Martinez, Karl-Heinz Maurer, Ulrich Schwaneberg
ABSTRACT

Directed evolution offers opportunities to improve promiscuous activities of hydrolases in rounds of diversity generation and high-throughput screening. In this article, we developed and validated a screening platform to improve the perhydrolytic activity of proteases and likely other hydrolases (e.g., lipases or esterases). Key was the development of a highly sensitive fluorescent assay (sensitivity in the µM range) based on 3-carboxy-7-hydroxycoumarin (HCC) formation. HCC is released through an hypobromite-mediated oxidation of 7-(4'-aminophenoxy)-3-carboxycoumarin (APCC), which enables for the first time a continuous measurement of peroxycarboxylic acid formation with a standard deviation of 11% in microtiter plates with a wide pH range window (5-9). As example, subtilisin Carlsberg was subjected to site saturation mutagenesis at position G165, yielding a variant T58A/G165L/L216W with 5.4-fold increased k(cat) for perhydrolytic activity compared with wild type.

MATERIALS
Product Number
Brand
Product Description

Supelco
Density Standard 1251 kg/m3, H&D Fitzgerald Ltd. Quality
Sigma-Aldrich
Sodium bromide, BioXtra, ≥99.0%
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