Computer-Aided Engineering of a Transglycosylase for the Glucosylation of an Unnatural Disaccharide of Relevance for Bacterial Antigen Synthesis

The exploration of chemo-enzymatic routes to complex carbohydrates has been hampered by the lack of appropriate enzymatic tools having the substrate specificity for new reactions. Here, we used a computer-aided design framework to guide the construction of a small, diversity-controlled library of amino acid sequences of an α-transglucosylase, the sugar binding subsites of which were re-engineered to enable the challenging 1,2-cis-glucosylation of a partially protected β-linked disaccharide allyl (2-deoxy-2-trichloroacetamido-β-d-glucopyranosyl)-(1→2)-α-l-rhamnopyranoside, a potential intermediate in the synthesis of Shigella flexneri cell-surface oligosaccharides. The target disaccharide is not recognized by the parental wild-type enzyme and exhibits a molecular structure very distinct from that of the natural α-(1→4)-linked acceptor. A profound reshaping of the binding pocket had thus to be performed. Following the selection of 23 amino acid positions from the first shell, mutations were sampled using Ro...