Molecular design of artificial restriction enzymes.

Programmable DNA-Guided Artificial Restriction Enzymes.

Restriction enzymes are essential tools for recombinant DNA technology that have revolutionized modern biological research. However, they have limited sequence specificity and availability. Here we report a Pyrococcus furiosus Argonaute (PfAgo) based platform for generating artificial restriction enzymes (AREs) capable of recognizing and cleaving DNA sequences at virtually any arbitrary site an...

How restriction enzymes became the workhorses of molecular biology.

Restriction enzymes have proved to be invaluable for the physical mapping of DNA. They offer unparalleled opportunities for diagnosing DNA sequence content and are used in fields as disparate as criminal forensics and basic research. In fact, without restriction enzymes, the biotechnology industry would certainly not have flourished as it has. The first experiments demonstrating the utility of ...

A Novel Approach to the Rational Design of Artificial Enzymes

This thesis describes a new approach to the rational design of an artificial esterase, and is in three parts. The first part of the thesis is an introduction to the design and synthesis of artificial enzymes. This details both traditional "design', and more recent 'selection' approaches to artificial enzymes, and discusses the advantages and problems associated with the different strategies. Th...

Artificial Enzymes

Artificial enzymes.

Simple chemical catalysts have been designed to achieve some desirable features of enzymes. These novel catalysts are not proteins, but they may incorporate the typical enzyme catalytic groups and they achieve selectivity in their reactions by use of geometric control, as do enzymes. Catalysts that carry out geometrically controlled chlorinations of aromatic rings and steroids have been constru...