Patel Armaan, Mulder David W, Söll Dieter, Krahn Natalie
Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Biosciences Center, Golden, CO, United States.
Front Catal. 2022;2. doi: 10.3389/fctls.2022.1089176. Epub 2022 Dec 22.
Hydrogen is a clean, renewable energy source, that when combined with oxygen, produces heat and electricity with only water vapor as a biproduct. Furthermore, it has the highest energy content by weight of all known fuels. As a result, various strategies have engineered methods to produce hydrogen efficiently and in quantities that are of interest to the economy. To approach the notion of producing hydrogen from a biological perspective, we take our attention to hydrogenases which are naturally produced in microbes. These organisms have the machinery to produce hydrogen, which when cleverly engineered, could be useful in cell factories resulting in large production of hydrogen. Not all hydrogenases are efficient at hydrogen production, and those that are, tend to be oxygen sensitive. Therefore, we provide a new perspective on introducing selenocysteine, a highly reactive proteinogenic amino acid, as a strategy towards engineering hydrogenases with enhanced hydrogen production, or increased oxygen tolerance.
氢是一种清洁的可再生能源，与氧气结合时，仅产生水蒸气这一副产物就能产生热量和电力。此外，它是所有已知燃料中按重量计算能量含量最高的。因此，各种策略都设计了有效生产氢气的方法，且产量达到经济上可行的规模。从生物学角度探讨氢气生产的概念时，我们将注意力转向微生物中天然产生的氢化酶。这些生物体具备产生氢气的机制，经过巧妙改造后，可用于细胞工厂大量生产氢气。并非所有氢化酶在氢气生产方面都高效，而且那些高效的氢化酶往往对氧气敏感。因此，我们提供了一个新视角，即引入硒代半胱氨酸（一种高反应性的蛋白质ogenic氨基酸），作为一种改造氢化酶以提高氢气产量或增强氧气耐受性的策略。
