These tiny machines seek, destroy and assemble. If you're wondering what these magnificent machines are, I will get to that soon enough. For now, just know that these advanced machines are not made of metal and they are not robots--despite what you may think. They have the ability to cut and paste DNA, destroy and degrade proteins, speed up reactions and are part of our everyday lives. You may have already figured it out when I mentioned DNA, but I'm referring to enzymes!
Enzymes make our lives easier.
Enzymes are proteins that speed up chemical reactions, are an essential part of our bodily functions and are used in technologies for making detergents, food and beverages, DNA technologies and have numerous other applications in industry.
The enzyme subtilisin is used in laundry detergents to degrade and chew up the proteins in your dirty laundry! I also found that subtilisin is a main ingredient in deer hunting scent control products--it blocks smells by destroying the proteins that cause the smells.
The enzyme complex rennet coagulates casein in milk, causing solids to separate to be collected and formed into cheese. This rennet complex of enzymes is produced in the stomachs of ruminant mammals, and in the "old days", people would place small slices of dried, cleaned stomachs of young calves into a solution of milk and vinegar to make cheese.
For making wine, yeast is added to grape juice in an environment that allows for fermentation to take place. Yeast contains enzymes that speed up alcoholic fermentation, ethanol (alcohol) is a by-product of this process. In other commercial use-cases enzymes like pectinases and glycosidases are used.
How enzymes are used in DNA Technology.
Enzymes are also used to cut, paste, assemble and sequence DNA. One of the most notable enzymes for DNA technologies is taq polymerase, an enzyme found in a species of bacteria (thermus aquaticus) that grow in hot springs with extremely hot temperatures (65°C-85°C, or about 150°F-185°F).
Taq polymerase was extracted from these bacteria for its ability to assemble DNA strands at high temperatures without being destroyed by the heat. Taq polymerase is used in a machine called a thermal cycler that cycles between hot and cool temperatures to make additional copies of that DNA sequence—basically a DNA copy machine.
Restriction enzymes cut DNA at short palindromic segments of the DNA sequence called restriction sites. Various restriction enzymes like EcoRI, BamHI, HindIII and SmaI were discovered that different bacteria possess different restriction enzymes. Ligases are enzymes used to paste DNA segments together. Modern molecular biologists use a combination of types of enzymes to cut DNA pieces at specific locations in the sequence, insert DNA into the cut section and paste it back together.
Enzyme engineering
Technology is increasing, and scientists are now engineering enzymes to work better. Enzyme engineering involves redesigning enzyme proteins by changing their amino acid sequence through recombinant DNA mutation.
Site-directed mutation is a technique used in enzyme engineering to make small changes in the protein structure, that could potentially have big impacts on the enzyme's function. The mutations can be aided by powerful computers to change target locations on the enzyme’s proteinaceous structure and increase the function of the enzyme.
In directed evolution, a shotgun approach is used to create a plasmid library of random mutated genes that code for different various enzymes structures that can potentially have different functions. The enzymes are screened and selected for desired increase in enzyme activity. Scientists are using these techniques to create more active super-enzymes if you will, and can be applied to engineer almost any type of enzyme or protein.
The examples of enzymes provided in this blog are not all-inclusive as there are many, many more that we would not have time to cover. I hope you enjoyed learning about enzymes and how these tiny machines are helping us in our day-to-day lives, and about the many ways enzymes have been used throughout history and in modern biotechnology.
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