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Updated: Jul 16, 2026

A Customizable Approach for the Enzymatic Production and Purification of Diterpenoid Natural Products
Published on: October 4, 2019
Engineering productive enzyme confinement
A Keith Dunker1, Ariel Fernández
1Center for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Indiana University School of Medicine, 410 W. 10th Street, Suite 5000, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA.
Abstract:
Natural enzymes were selected to function inside the cell, not in the test tube; therefore, their performance is optimized for the crowded conditions encountered in vivo. Most man-made matrices for enzyme confinement lead to suboptimal catalytic activity. Ackerman and colleagues showed that an entrapping environment consisting of functionalized mesoporous silica actually enhances enzyme activity beyond the test-tube levels of free enzymes in solution. These findings provide an approach for dissecting the effect of various contributors to enzyme activity and thereby provide a means for fine-tuning the entrapping matrices to optimize enzyme performance in a rational way.
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