Leveraging yeast sequestration to study and engineer post-translational
modification enzymes.
Abstract
Enzymes that catalyze post-translational modifications of peptides and
proteins (PTM-enzymes) – proteases, protein ligases, oxidoreductases,
kinases, and other transferases - are foundational to our understanding
of health and disease and empower applications in chemical biology,
synthetic biology, and biomedicine. To fully harness the potential of
PTM-enzymes, there is a critical need to decipher their enzymatic and
biological mechanisms, develop molecules that can probe and reprogram
them, and endow them with improved and novel functions. These objectives
are contingent upon implementation of high-throughput functional screens
and selections that interrogate large sequence libraries to isolate
desired PTM-enzyme properties. This review discusses the principles of
S. cerevisiae organelle sequestration to study and engineer
PTM-enzymes. These include methods that modify yeast surface display and
employ enzyme-mediated transcription activation to evolve the activity
and substrate specificity of proteases and protein ligases. We also
present a detailed discussion of yeast endoplasmic reticulum (ER)
sequestration for the first time. Where appropriate, we highlight the
major features and limitations of different systems, specifically how
they can measure and control enzyme catalytic efficiencies. Taken
together, yeast-based high-throughput sequestration approaches
significantly lower the barrier to understanding how PTM-enzymes
function and how to reprogram them.