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Enzyme pathways

C1 metabolism redesigned

Nature Chemical Biology volume 11, pages 384–386 (2015)Cite this article

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One-carbon metabolic pathways create new opportunities for metabolic engineering, but natural pathways have limitations in catalytic efficiency and interspecies transferability. Now a computationally designed enzyme, formolase, enables the construction of a synthetic metabolic pathway in Escherichia coli for assimilation of formate into a glycolytic intermediate in only five reaction steps.

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Figure 1: A synthetic one-carbon metabolic pathway enabled by computational protein design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yi-Shu Tai and Kechun Zhang are in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.,

    Yi-Shu Tai & Kechun Zhang

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  1. Yi-Shu Tai
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  2. Kechun Zhang
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Correspondence to Kechun Zhang.

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Tai, YS., Zhang, K. C1 metabolism redesigned. Nat Chem Biol 11, 384–386 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.1819

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