Substrate flexibility and reaction specificity of tropinone reductase-like short-chain dehydrogenases.

Annotations of protein or gene sequences from large scale sequencing projects are based on protein size, characteristic binding motifs, and conserved catalytic amino acids, but biochemical functions are often uncertain. In the large family of short-chain dehydrogenases/reductases (SDRs), functional predictions often fail. Putative tropinone reductases, named tropinone reductase-like (TRL), are SDRs annotated in many genomes of organisms that do not contain tropane alkaloids.