Construction of artificial enzymes on a virus surface

Abstract

Combination of artificial enzyme design and self-assembly strategies leads to a novel way to construct supramolecular enzymes. To address this challenge, auxotrophic expression systems show great potential because they can introduce nonnatural catalytic groups into the subunits of protein assemblies. Among nonnatural amino acids, selenocysteine is the catalytic group of glutathione peroxidase (GPx). With the aid of computer simulation, we have incorporated selenocysteine into natural protein assemblies such as tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and ferritin by cysteine auxotrophic technology, resulting in the conversion of TMV and ferritin into supramolecular enzymes.