Establishment of a high throughput-screening system for nucleoside deoxyribosyltransferase II mutant enzymes with altered substrate specificity.

Nucleoside deoxyribosyltransferase II (NDT) catalyzes the transglycosylation reaction of the 2'-deoxyribose moiety between purine and/or pyrimidine bases and has been widely used in the synthesis of nucleoside analogs. The high specificity of NDT for 2'-deoxyribose limits its applications. Because 2'C- and/or 3'C-modified nucleosides have been widely used as antiviral or antitumour agents, improving the activity of NDT towards these modified nucleosides by protein engineering is an area of interest to the pharmaceutical industry. NDT engineering is hindered by a lack of effective screening methods. This study developed a high-throughput screening system, which was established by nucleoside deoxyribosyltransferase II-cytidine deaminase co-expression, indophenol colorimetric assay and whole-cell catalysis. A high-throughput screening system for NDT was established for the first time. This system can be applied to detect NDT-specific activity for a variety of cytidine analogs with glycosyl and base modifications, such as 5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine, 2',3'-dideoxycytidine, cytosine-β-d-arabinofuranoside. In this study, we adopted the semi-rational design of NDT and constructed a mutant library of NDT from Lactobacillus helveticus (LhNDT) by site-saturation mutagenesis. Over 600 mutants were screened, and a variant with up to a 5.2-fold higher conversion rate of 2',3'-dideoxyinosine was obtained.