Lu Yi, Yeung Natasha, Sieracki Nathan, Marshall Nicholas M
Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
Nature. 2009 Aug 13;460(7257):855-62. doi: 10.1038/nature08304.
Metalloproteins catalyse some of the most complex and important processes in nature, such as photosynthesis and water oxidation. An ultimate test of our knowledge of how metalloproteins work is to design new metalloproteins. Doing so not only can reveal hidden structural features that may be missing from studies of native metalloproteins and their variants, but also can result in new metalloenzymes for biotechnological and pharmaceutical applications. Although it is much more challenging to design metalloproteins than non-metalloproteins, much progress has been made in this area, particularly in functional design, owing to recent advances in areas such as computational and structural biology.
金属蛋白催化自然界中一些最复杂和重要的过程，如光合作用和水氧化。对我们关于金属蛋白如何工作的知识的最终检验是设计新的金属蛋白。这样做不仅可以揭示天然金属蛋白及其变体研究中可能缺失的隐藏结构特征，还可以产生用于生物技术和制药应用的新金属酶。尽管设计金属蛋白比设计非金属蛋白更具挑战性，但由于计算生物学和结构生物学等领域的最新进展，该领域已经取得了很大进展，特别是在功能设计方面。
