A programmable bifunctional flavoenzyme for direct amine-to-ester conversion
Yaoyun Wu, Wei Song, Wanqing Wei, Liming Liu, Jing Wu · 2026
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Description
Yaoyun Wu and colleagues report a 2026 journal article on an enzyme rebuilt from an ancient ancestor that runs two normally separate chemical reactions in one pocket. Industry often converts amines into esters, a two-step job that nature splits between two enzyme families. The team used ancestral sequence reconstruction, inferring an extinct protein's code from living relatives.
Their rebuilt enzyme, AncFO-221, chains amine oxidation straight into the oxygen-insertion step, making a continuous cycle rather than a loose cascade. Guided by that mechanism, engineering produced a variant with about eighteen-fold better efficiency and near-complete suppression of side reactions. Lactone yields reached ninety-three percent, and the enzyme could be tuned to break the classical rule for which group migrates.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yaoyun Wu, Wei Song, Wanqing Wei, Liming Liu, Jing Wu |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 50606 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |