| Title: | Loop replacement design: a new way to improve potency of plant cystatins |
| Address: | "Department of Plant and Soil Sciences Department, Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Future Production, Chemicals Cluster, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, South Africa" |
| ISSN/ISBN: | 1742-4658 (Electronic) 1742-464X (Linking) |
| Abstract: | "Plant cystatins function as competitive inhibitors of cysteine proteases. Similar to other defence proteins, cystatins include hypervariable, positively selected amino acid sites presumably impacting their biological activity. Protein engineering approaches, such as point mutations, at these functionally relevant amino acid sites have already been found to be a powerful tool in improving the inhibitory properties of cystatins. Such engineered cystatins not only better protect against digestive proteases of herbivorous arthropods but also against cysteine proteases of several other plant pests as well as against cysteine proteases produced in plant during stress-induced senescence. Despite previous engineering successes, an urgent need still exists to further improve both plant cystatin potency and specificity. Tremblay and colleagues propose in this issue a new cystatin engineering strategy to substitute the function-related structural elements (SEs) of a cystatin by the corresponding elements of an alternative cystatin. This strategy, possibly combined with direct cystatin gene editing in a target plant, might provide an innovative way to control cysteine protease activity. Comment on https://doi.org/10.1111/febs.16288" |
| Keywords: | *Cystatins/chemistry/genetics/metabolism *Cysteine Proteases/metabolism Cysteine Proteinase Inhibitors/pharmacology Plant Proteins/genetics/metabolism Plants/genetics/metabolism cystatin loop replacement gene editing hybrid cystatin plant cystatin protein; |
| Notes: | "MedlineKunert, Karl J Pillay, Priyen eng Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't England 2022/01/04 FEBS J. 2022 Apr; 289(7):1823-1826. doi: 10.1111/febs.16335. Epub 2022 Jan 3" |
