A high-quality paper by the research team of University of South China on the Progress in design of artificial metalloenzyme has been published in the famous journal of ACS Catalysis.

Metalloenzymes play irreplaceable roles in biological systems, and few artificial metalloenzymes can achieve the activity of natural enzymes, which becomes a difficulty in the field of artificial metalloenzyme design. Recently, the team, headed by Prof. Ying-Wu Lin from School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, USC, has made a significant progress in this field. Using the normal protein myoglobin, they successfully designed an artificial enzyme, which exhibits an activity that exceeds most of natural peroxidases and is similar to the most efficient horseradish peroxidase, as shown in the Figure. Therefore, the artificial enzyme is expected to be an ideal substitute for natural peroxidases, and may have potential applications in biological and environmental catalysis.

Their work has been published in the famous journal of ACS Catalysis, with a high impact factor of 12.221. The first author is Ms. Ping Zhang, a postgraduate student from School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and the corresponding author is Prof. Ying-Wu Lin. This project has been co-funded by Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the Steady High Magnetic Field Facilities, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, as well as the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of PRC.

For the full view of the paper, go to https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscatal.9b05080