Computational Tools Applied to Enzyme Design − a review

The protein design toolbox has been greatly improved by the addition of enzyme computational simulations. Not only do they warrant a more ambitious and thorough exploration of sequence space, but a much higher number of variants and protein-ligand systems can be analyzed in silico compared to experimental engineering methods. Modern computational tools are being used to redesign and also for de novo generation of enzymes. These approaches are contingent on a deep understanding of the reaction mechanism and the enzyme’s three-dimensional structure coordinates, but the wealth of information produced by these analyses leads to greatly improved or even totally new types of catalysis.