A disulfide bridge in the calcium binding site of a polyester hydrolase increases its thermal stability and activity against polyethylene terephthalate

July 28, 2017

Title

A disulfide bridge in the calcium binding site of a polyester hydrolase increases its thermal stability and activity against polyethylene terephthalate

Author

Johannes Then, Ren Wei, Thorsten Oeser, André Gerdts, Juliane Schmidt, Markus Barth, Wolfgang Zimmermann

Year

2016

Journal

FEBS Open Bio

Abstract

Elevated reaction temperatures are crucial for the efficient enzymatic degradation of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). A disulfide bridge was introduced to the polyester hydrolase TfCut2 to substitute its calcium binding site. The melting point of the resulting variant increased to 94.7 °C (wild-type TfCut2: 69.8 °C) and its half-inactivation temperature to 84.6 °C (TfCut2: 67.3 °C). The variant D204C-E253C-D174R obtained by introducing further mutations at vicinal residues showed a temperature optimum between 75 and 80 °C compared to 65 and 70 °C of the wild-type enzyme. The variant caused a weight loss of PET films of 25.0 ± 0.8% (TfCut2: 0.3 ± 0.1%) at 70 °C after a reaction time of 48 h. The results demonstrate that a highly efficient and calcium-independent thermostable polyester hydrolase can be obtained by replacing its calcium binding site with a disulfide bridge.

Instrument

J-715

Keywords

Circular dichroism, Protein denaturation, Secondary structure, Thermodynamics, Biochemistry