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Updated: Nov 22, 2025

Multi-enzyme Screening Using a High-throughput Genetic Enzyme Screening System
Published on: August 8, 2016
Discovery of new enzymatic functions and metabolic pathways using genomic enzymology web tools
Remi Zallot1, Nils Oberg2, John A Gerlt3
1Carl. R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, United States; Institute of Life Sciences, Swansea University Medical School, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
The continuing expansion of protein and genome sequence databases is an opportunity to identify novel enzymes with biotechnological applications. Whether applied to enzymology, chemical biology, systems biology, and microbiology, database mining must be 'user-friendly' so that experimentalists can devise focused strategies to discover the in vitro activities and in vivo functions of uncharacterized enzymes. We developed a suite of genomic enzymology tools (https://efi.igb.illinois.edu/) to (1) generate sequence similarity networks (SSNs) for exploration of sequence-function space in protein families (EFI-EST) and (2) provide genome context for members of protein families (EFI-GNT). Integrated analysis of this complementary information allows to generate testable hypotheses about new functions. After a brief overview of EFI-EST and EFI-GNT, we describe applications that illustrate their use.
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