Dual Engineering of the Hydrophobic Core and Functional Loop Reshapes the Conformational Energy Landscape for Significantly Enhanced Xylanase Activity and Thermostability.
Aug 2026· Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry· Vol 74 32, pp.
25476-25489
· 0 citations· 66 references
Medicine
Abstract
The industrial application of enzyme catalysts is often constrained by the trade-off between thermostability and catalytic activity. Here, a region-focused engineering strategy was applied to a thermophilic GH10 xylanase to simultaneously improve both properties. The strategy integrates qProtein-guided hydrophobic cluster design for scaffold stabilization and dynamic loop analysis for active-site optimization. The resulting triple mutant A206S-N209D-F130L exhibited substantially improved thermostability, with a 5.79 °C increase in melting temperature and an 18.8-fold extension of the half-life at 60 °C. Its optimum temperature increased from 60 to 70 °C, accompanied by a 129.4% enhancement in catalytic activity at 70 °C relatively to the wild type. Molecular dynamics simulations indicated that these mutations reshape the conformational energy landscape by stabilizing hydrophobic packing and modulating loop dynamics. This study provides a generalizable framework for simultaneously improving enzyme stability and catalytic performance.
This work rationally engineered flexible loops near the active site via molecular dynamics, NMsim, NMsim, sequence conservation analysis, and MAESTRO prediction, and obtained the optimal double mutant M1, which showed 1.54-fold higher specific activity and nearly 2-fold improved pH stability at pH 8, with a nearly doub...
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