An Engineered Metalloprotein as a Functional and Structural Bioinorganic Model System

摘要

Despite the rapid advances which have occurred in structural biology and computational chemistry, the rational design of functional protein structures continues to be one of the most challenging objectives in the field of protein engineering involving synthetic model compounds and de novo peptides. The engineering of active sites is more complicated for metalloenzymes than for non-metalloenzymes because individual metal coordination geometries and oxidation states must be taken into account to ensure the desired function. Although elegant de novo designs of heme and non-heme proteins with symmetrical coordination centers have been reported recently, metalloenzymes with asymmetrical coordination centers have rarely been mimicked, even through the use of model compounds. Lu and co-workers recently described the rational design of a model metalloprotein containing a sophisticated metal center with the structural and functional properties of a native metalloen-zyme.