The past decade has witnessed a paradigm shift in preclinical drug discovery with structure-based drug design (SBDD) making a comeback while high-throughput screening (HTS) methods have continued to generate disappointing results. There is a deficit of information between identified hits…

Enzymes that catalyze carbon-carbon bond formation can be exploited as biocatalyst for synthetic organic chemistry. However, natural enzymes frequently do not possess the required properties or specificities to catalyze industrially useful transformations. This mini-review describes recent work using knowledge-guided site-specific…

Numerous bioactive natural products are synthesised by modular polyketide synthases. These compounds can be made in high yield by native multienzyme assembly lines. In contrast, formation of analogues by genetically engineered systems is often considerably less efficient. Biochemical studies on…

Antifoams are often added to bioprocesses with little knowledge of their impact on the cells or product. However, it is known that certain antifoams can affect the growth rates of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms in addition to changing surface…

The hemoglobin (VHb) from Vitreoscilla was the first bacterial hemoglobin discovered.  Its structure and function have been extensively investigated, and engineering of a wide variety of heterologous organisms to express VHb has been performed to increase their growth and productivity. …

Oxygenases are ubiquitous enzymes that catalyze the introduction of one or two oxygen atoms to unreactive chemical compounds. They require reduction equivalents from NADH or NADPH and comprise metal ions, metal ion complexes, or coenzymes in their active site. Thus,…

Microbial biocatalysts such as Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae have been extensively subjected to Metabolic Engineering for the fermentative production of biorenewable fuels and chemicals. This often entails the introduction of new enzymes, deletion of unwanted enzymes and efforts to…

The knowledge-based Toxtree expert system (SAR approach) was integrated with the statistically based counter propagation artificial neural network (CP ANN) model (QSAR approach) to contribute to a better mechanistic understanding of a carcinogenicity model for non-congeneric chemicals using Dragon descriptors…

Xylanases belong to an important class of industrial enzymes. Various xylanases have been purified and characterized from a plethora of organisms including bacteria, marine algae, plants, protozoans, insects, snails and crustaceans. Depending on the source, the enzymatic activity of xylanases…