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Friday 3 August 2012

NHase in halophilic archaeon DL31

I notice that both an alpha chain and a beta chain of a cobalt centred NHase have been recently annotated (14 June 2012) in the genome of the rather unprepossessingly named "halophilic archaeon DL31". It must be quite an elusive beast because Google Images doesn't deliver a picture of anything suitable.
Halophilicity quite often comes with tolerance to alkaline conditions, which can mean all sorts of utility in the world of synthetic biocatalysis. As I mentioned in the "No extremes" post we published with Roger Sheldon's group on the synthetic potential of one of these halophilic NHases, but this is a good example of a genome-sourced potential halophilic NHase. BLASTing both the alpha and beta chains against prokaryotic genomes shows that the beta chain is most similar to beta chain of Caldalkalibacillus thermarum TA2.A1 (I think we can guess the proclivities of this microbe) with 3 of the next 4 best hits being the sequences from the crystal structures 3HHT, 2DPP and 1V29 all of which are moderately thermophilic.


Interestingly there is a slightly different aspect to the alpha chain BLAST: Pseudonocardia dioxanivorans and Rhodopseudomonas palustris make up the top hits before Caldalkalibacillus thermarum TA2.A1 turns up.

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