Mechanism of Enzyme Catalysis: When Structure Meets Function

Dear Colleagues,

Proteins are essential biomacromolecules in all organisms, as they perform diverse biochemical tasks in cells, including enzymatic catalysis. Advances in sequencing technologies and computational power provided an explosion of sequence information—currently there are almost 250 million of nucleotide sequences in GenBank database. However, only ~570 000 of protein sequences are listed in SwissProt, the manually annotated and reviewed portion of UniProtKB, and only a small percentage of these have experimentally determined function. The function of proteins, and more specifically enzymes, is intimately linked with their three-dimensional structure. The size, shape and charge of the active site, interactions between domains and/or subunits, protein dynamics, existence of cofactor and/or allosteric sites, conservation of catalytic residues, these are just some of the key structural features that reveal mechanistic details of molecular function and lead to hypothesis about how a given enzyme operates. One has to keep in mind, though, that structure alone is not enough to predict specific function of an enzyme. As enzyme catalysis can be finely tuned by e.g. minute differences in active site or allosteric site residues, substrate specificity determination requires functional studies (i.e., old-fashioned biochemistry). For an enzyme to be applicable in any branch of industry or to be considered as a drug target, its structure and function have to be investigated in detail, and by a multidisciplinary approach, collecting the knowledge from all possible sides. Following this line of thought, this special issue welcomes contributions containing both experimental and computational research aspiring to shed a light on the complex topic of the mechanism of enzyme catalysis.

Dr. Ivana Leščić Ašler
Guest Editor

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• three-dimensional structure of enzymes
• enzyme stability, solubility and flexibility
• structure-function relationship in enzymes
• mechanism of enzyme catalysis
• enzyme kinetics
• substrate specificity of enzymes
• regulation of enzyme activity
• enzyme engineering