Taking Advantage of Promiscuity of Cold-Active Enzymes

Abstract

Cold-active enzymes increase their catalytic efficiency at low-temperature, introducing structural flexibility at or near the active sites. Inevitably, this feat seems to be accompanied by lower thermal stability. These characteristics have made cold-active enzymes into attractive targets for the industrial applications, since they could reduce the energy cost in the reaction, attenuate side-reactions, and simply be inactivated. In addition, the increased structural flexibility could result in broad substrate specificity for various non-native substrates, which is called substrate promiscuity. In this perspective, we deal with a less addressed aspect of cold-active enzymes, substrate promiscuity, which has enormous potential for semi-synthesis or enzymatic modification of fine chemicals and drugs. Further structural and directed-evolutional studies on substrate promiscuity of cold-active enzymes will provide a new workhorse in white biotechnology.