Broadening the scope of glycosyltransferase-catalyzed sugar nucleotide synthesis.

We described the integration of the general reversibility of glycosyltransferase-catalyzed reactions, artificial glycosyl donors, and a high throughput colorimetric screen to enable the engineering of glycosyltransferases for combinatorial sugar nucleotide synthesis. The best engineered catalyst from this study, the OleD Loki variant, contained the mutations P67T/I112P/T113M/S132F/A242I compared with the OleD wild-type sequence. Evaluated against the parental sequence OleD TDP16 variant used for screening, the OleD Loki variant displayed maximum improvements in k(cat)/K(m) of >400-fold and >15-fold for formation of NDP-glucoses and UDP-sugars, respectively. This OleD Loki variant also demonstrated efficient turnover with five variant NDP acceptors and six variant 2-chloro-4-nitrophenyl glycoside donors to produce 30 distinct NDP-sugars. This study highlights a convenient strategy to rapidly optimize glycosyltransferase catalysts for the synthesis of complex sugar nucleotides and the practical synthesis of a unique set of sugar nucleotides.