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Updated: Jul 19, 2025

Sequence-specific Labeling of Nucleic Acids and Proteins with Methyltransferases and Cofactor Analogues
Published on: November 22, 2014
Artificial Small Molecules as Cofactors and Biomacromolecular Building Blocks in Synthetic Biology: Design,
Fenghua Liu1,2,3,4, Lingling He5, Sheng Dong1,2,3,4
1CAS Key Laboratory of Biofuels, Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Synthetic Biology, Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 189 Songling Road, Qingdao 266101, China.
Abstract:
Enzymes are essential catalysts for various chemical reactions in biological systems and often rely on metal ions or cofactors to stabilize their structure or perform functions. Improving enzyme performance has always been an important direction of protein engineering. In recent years, various artificial small molecules have been successfully used in enzyme engineering. The types of enzymatic reactions and metabolic pathways in cells can be expanded by the incorporation of these artificial small molecules either as cofactors or as building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids, which greatly promotes the development and application of biotechnology. In this review, we summarized research on artificial small molecules including biological metal cluster mimics, coenzyme analogs (mNADs), designer cofactors, non-natural nucleotides (XNAs), and non-natural amino acids (nnAAs), focusing on their design, synthesis, and applications as well as the current challenges in synthetic biology.
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