Engineering of a thermophilic dihydroxy-acid dehydratase to enhance its dehydration ability on glycerate to pyruvate and its application in in vitro synthetic enzymatic biosystems

The low activity of dihydroxy-acid dehydratase (DHAD) on dehydration of glycerate to pyruvate hampers its applications in the biosystems. Protein engineering of a thermophilic DHAD from Sulfolobus solfataricus (SsDHAD) was performed to increase its dehydratation activity. A novel high-throughput method was established. A triple-mutant (I161M/Y145S/G205K) with a 10-fold higher activity on glycerate dehydration was obtained after three rounds of iterative saturation mutagenesis (ISM) based on computational analysis. The shrunk substrate-binding pocket and newly formed hydrogen bonds were the reason for the activity improvement of the mutant. For the in vitro synthetic enzymatic biosystems of converting glucose or glycerol to L-lactate, the biosystems with the mutant SsDHAD showed 3.32- and 2.34-times of the reaction rate than that of wild type, respectively. This study demonstrates the potential of protein engineering to improve the efficiency of in vitro synthetic enzymatic biosystems by enhancing the enzyme activity of rate-limited enzymes.