Unraveling Energy and Dynamics Determinants to Interpret Protein Functional Plasticity: The Limonene-1,2-epoxide-hydrolase Case Study.

The balance between structural stability and functional plasticity in proteins that share common three-dimensional folds is the key factor that drives protein evolvability. The ability to distinguish the parts of homologous proteins that underlie common structural organization patterns from the parts acting as regulatory modules that can sustain modifications in response to evolutionary pressure may provide fundamental insights for understanding sequence-structure-dynamics relationships. In applicative terms, this would help develop rational protein design methods.

Discovery and characterization of thermophilic limonene-1,2-epoxide hydrolases from hot spring metagenomic libraries.

The epoxide hydrolases (EHs) represent an attractive option for the synthesis of chiral epoxides and 1,2-diols which are valuable building blocks for the synthesis of several pharmaceutical compounds. A metagenomic approach has been used to identify two new members of the atypical EH limonene-1,2-epoxide hydrolase (LEH) family of enzymes. These two LEHs (Tomsk-LEH and CH55-LEH) show EH activities towards different epoxide substrates, differing in most cases from those previously identified for Rhodococcus erythropolis (Re-LEH) in terms of stereoselectivity.