Evolutionary biochemists define enzyme promiscuity as the ability to catalyze secondary
reactions that are physiologically irrelevant, either because they are too inefficient to affect …

Anthropogenic compounds used as pesticides, solvents and explosives often persist in the
environment and can cause toxicity to humans and wildlife. The persistence of …

The benzoquinone ubiquinone (coenzyme Q) and the naphthoquinones menaquinone
(vitamin K 2) and demethylmenaquinone are derived from the shikimate pathway, which has …

Catalytic promiscuity and substrate ambiguity are keys to evolvability, which in turn is pivotal
to the successful acquisition of novel biological functions. Action on multiple substrates …

Natural evolution has yielded enzymes that catalyze virtually all metabolic reactions under
mild conditions with high specificities and enormous rate enhancements. 1 It has been a …

The members of the mechanistically diverse enolase superfamily catalyze different overall
reactions. Each shares a partial reaction in which an active site base abstracts the α-proton …

Background Glutathione is found primarily in eukaryotes and in Gram-negative bacteria. It
has been proposed that eukaryotes acquired the genes for glutathione biosynthesis from the …

Designing artificial systems with catalytic efficiencies to rival those of natural enzymes is one
of the great challenges facing science today. Our current level of understanding fails the …

The Escherichia coli genome encodes seven paralogues of the crotonase (enoyl CoA
hydratase) superfamily. Four of these have unknown or uncertain functions; their existence …

The members of the mechanistically diverse,(β/α) 8-barrel fold-containing enolase
superfamily evolved from a common progenitor but catalyze different reactions using a …