A bacterial glycosyltransferase gene toolbox: generation and applications.

The bioactivity of many natural products produced by microorganisms can be attributed to their sugar substituents. These substituents are transferred as nucleotide-activated sugars to an aglycon by glycosyltransferases. Engineering these enzymes can broaden their substrate specificity and can therefore have an impact on the bioactivity of the secondary metabolites. In this review we present the generation of a glycosyltransferase gene toolbox which contains more than 70 bacterial glycosyltransferases to date. Investigations of the function, specificity and structure of these glycosyltransferases help to understand the great potential of these enzymes for natural product biosynthesis.