Over the years, protein engineers have studied nature and borrowed its tricks to accelerate
protein evolution in the test tube. While there have been considerable advances, our ability …

The variety of halogenated substances and their derivatives widely used as pesticides,
herbicides and other industrial products is of great concern due to the hazardous nature of …

Engineering enzymes to degrade anthropogenic compounds efficiently is challenging. We
obtained Rhodococcus rhodochrous haloalkane dehalogenase mutants with up to 32-fold …

Millions of protein sequences are being discovered at an incredible pace, representing an
inexhaustible source of biocatalysts. Here, we describe an integrated system for automated …

An enzyme's substrate specificity is one of its most important characteristics. The quantitative
comparison of broad-specificity enzymes requires the selection of a homogenous set of …

Eight mutants of the DhaA haloalkane dehalogenase carrying mutations at the residues
lining two tunnels, previously observed by protein X-ray crystallography, were constructed …

Next-generation sequencing doubles genomic databases every 2.5 years. The
accumulation of sequence data provides a unique opportunity to identify interesting …

Ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) represents a powerful approach for empirical
testing structure‐function relationships of diverse proteins. We employed ASR to predict …

To obtain structural insights into the emergence of biological functions from catalytically
promiscuous enzymes, we reconstructed an ancestor of catalytically distinct, but …

Haloalkane dehalogenases (HLDs) convert halogenated compounds to corresponding
alcohols, halides, and protons. They belong to α/β-hydrolases, and their principal catalytic …