Xylanase homology modeling using the inverse protein folding approach

Xylanase has been used in wood pulp bleaching in an effort to reduce chlorine release into the environment and pollution associated with paper production. The three‐dimensional structure of xylanase is important to enable better understanding of the enzyme mechanism and to help design a more thermostable xylanase mutant. At the time this work was begun, there was no sequence homologous protein available for traditional sequence‐based homology modeling. In order to circumvent this problem, the inverse protein folding approach was undertaken to find a suitable template structure. Model structures of Bacillus circulans xylanase were built based on the database search results of related proteins. The model structures were refined and compared to the recently solved xylanase X‐ray crystal structure. The overall structural similarity between the theoretical model and experimental structure demonstrate the usefulness of this approach. Disagreement in folding topology, however, warrants further research into the inverse protein folding approach.