Glycoside phosphorylases (GP) are a special group of carbohydrate-active enzymes, with characteristics in between those of hydrolases (GH) and transferases (GT). Their physiological role is the breakdown of a glycosidic bond using inorganic phosphate as nucleophile instead of water. Because of the high energy content of the generated glycosyl phosphate, this reaction can be efficiently reversed and exploited for synthetic purposes in vitro. Since this glycosyl donor is much cheaper than the nucleotide-activated sugars required by GT, phosphorylases have attracted a lot of attention from both industry and academia. In this talk, recent achievements will be presented concerning the discovery, engineering, and application of new GP representatives. In particular, possible strategies will be discussed for converting either GH or GT into the corresponding GP, based on a comparison of their structure and sequence and by mimicking pathways for their natural evolution.
Tom Desmet is a Professor at Ghent University, where he heads the Biotechnology Department. He received a PhD for elucidating structure-function relationships of (hemi)cellulases, in collaboration with Genencor Int (now IFF). After a postdoctoral stay at Wageningen University, he was appointed Associate Professor for Enzyme and Carbohydrate Technology in Ghent. He is particularly interested in the semi-rational design of carbohydrate-active enzymes and has developed several new processes for the synthesis of rare sugars, functional oligosaccharides and glycosylated compounds. He was the overall coordinator of the EU-project ‘SuSy’ (FP7) and he has organized the 4th Novel Enzymes Conference (2014) as well as the 15th Carbohydrate Bioengineering Meeting (2024).
