Cover: ‘Hot spot’ sites for engineering of enzyme catalytic properties identified in the structure of haloalkane dehalogenase using the web server HotSpot Wizard. The web server implements the protein engineering protocol, which targets evolutionarily variable residues located in the active site or lining the access tunnels (tubes). Automatically identified ‘hot spots’ (yellow balls) were able to accommodate a wide range of mutations in the gene saturation experiment and four of them (red balls) were proven to be important for catalytic activity of the enzyme in three independent directed evolution experiments.
The picture was prepared in PyMOL using the Python script generated by the HotSpot Wizard server. For more information, see the paper by Pavelka et al. in this issue (Nucleic Acids Res. 2009; 37, http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/37/9/2882, W376–W383).
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