Dear friends and colleagues!
Join the Chemspace & River Stone Bio ApS Webinar 'Improving characteristics of small molecules by enzymatic glycosylation', which will take place at 5:00 PM (CET) / 8:00 AM (PST) on September 16th, 2021.
The Speaker is Dr. Jørgen Hansen, CSO & CEO at River Stone Bio ApS.
‘Family 1 UDP-glucose glycosyltransferases (“UGTs”) are enzymes that will attach sugar units to small molecules. They are prevalent in mostly all organisms in Nature, but especially so in plants, where any given species will contain from 50 to more than 200 unique enzymes, differing in substrate specificity. Family 1 UGTs are subdivided into many sub-families based on sequence homology – alternatively in somewhat fewer “orthology groups”. Though a few of these subfamilies contain enzymes with somewhat similar functionality (e.g. the ability to “di-glycosylate”, that is putting a sugar onto a sugar sitting on a small molecule) it is usually not possible to predict functionality from gene sequence. Whereas many of the UGTs will only work with UDP-glucose as sugar donor, UDP-xylose, UDP-rhamnose and UDP-N-acetylglucosamine may sometimes be used and, in rarer instances, UDP-glucuronic acid and UDP-galactose. The sugars may be attached to hydroxy, carboxy, amino, and thiol side groups on the small molecule substrate.
River Stone ISG has assembled libraries of many hundreds of diverse UGT enzymes, mostly of plant origin. We express these enzymes in E. coli and screen for activity with a given substrate, either using a simple plate reader assay, or, e.g., HPLC-DAD for product detection. We provide such libraries to interested parties, and we also will do contract work to identify appropriate UGTs for a given molecule.’
