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Updated: Aug 20, 2026

Crystallization and Structural Determination of an Enzyme:Substrate Complex by Serial Crystallography in a Versatile Microfluidic Chip
Published on: March 20, 2021
Enzymatic activity on a chip: the critical role of protein orientation
Taewoon Cha1, Athena Guo, Xiao-Yang Zhu
1Department of Chemistry, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
Abstract:
We compare the catalytic activities of enzymes immobilized on silicon surfaces with and without orientation. While oriented sulfotransferases selectively immobilized on an otherwise zero-background surface via 6xHis tags faithfully reflect activities of solution phase enzymes, those with random orientation on the surface do not. This finding demonstrates that controlling the orientation of immobilized protein molecules and designing an ideal local chemical environment on the solid surface are both essential if protein microarrays are to be used as quantitative tools in biomedical research.
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