Strategies for engineering the thermo-stability of glycosidase

Abstract:

Glycosidases are widely used in food and pharmaceutical industries due to its ability to hydrolyze the glycosidic bonds of various sugar-containing compounds including glycosides, oligosaccharides and polysaccharides to generate derivatives with important physiological and pharmacological activity. While glycosidases often need to be used under high temperature to improve reaction efficiency and reduce contamination, most glycosidases are mesophilic enzymes with low activity under industrial production conditions. It is therefore critical to improve the thermo-stability of glycosidases. This review summarizes the recent advances achieved in engineering the thermo-stability of glycosidases using strategies such as directed evolution, rational design and semi-rational design. We also compared the pros and cons of various techniques and discussed the future prospects in this area.