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Cover Picture: Engineering of a Cytidine 5′‐Monophosphate‐Sialic Acid Synthetase for Improved Tolerance to Functional Sialic Acids (Adv. Synth. Catal. 18/2013)
Author(s) -
Yi Dong,
He Ning,
Kickstein Michael,
Metzner Julia,
Weiß Martin,
Berry Alan,
Fessner WolfDieter
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
advanced synthesis and catalysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Reports
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.541
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1615-4169
pISSN - 1615-4150
DOI - 10.1002/adsc.201301015
Subject(s) - chemistry , sialic acid , cytidine , biochemistry , combinatorial chemistry , enzyme
The front cover picture, provided by Dong Yi, Ning He, Michael Kickstein, Julia Metzner, Martin Weiß, Alan Berry and Wolf‐Dieter Fessner, illustrates the synthetic utility of a new variant of CMP‐sialic acid synthetase (CSS) from Neisseria meningitidis . The enzyme was engineered by structure‐guided, sitespecific saturation mutagenesis. Top hits display an improvement of up to 70‐fold catalytic efficiency relative to wild‐type CSS, without compromising protein stability. This enhanced substrate capacity is a major step towards a generalized strategy for the highly efficient, regio‐ and stereospecific generation of neosialoconjugate libraries for biomedical studies, as is reported in the full paper by Yi, He, Kickstein, Metzner, Weiß, Berry and Fessner on pages 3597‐3612 (DOI: 10.1002/adsc.201300568) .