Rational Mutagenesis in the Lid Domain of Ribokinase from Results in an Order of Magnitude Increase in Activity towards D-arabinose.

Development of efficient approaches for the production of medically important nucleosides is a highly relevant challenge for biotechnology. In particular, cascade synthesis of arabinosides would allow relatively easy production of various cytostatic and antiviral drugs. However, the biocatalyst necessary for this approach, ribokinase from (RK), has a very low activity towards D-arabinose, making the synthesis using the state-of-art native enzyme technologically unfeasible.