Improving the NADH-cofactor specificity of the highly active AdhZ3 and AdhZ2 from Escherichia coli K-12

• Change of the cofactor dependency for a biotechnology relevant alcohol dehydrogenase AdhZ3.
• Iterative approach to identify dehydrogenase variants with an altered cofactor acceptance.
• Complete screening of a mutagenesis bank on basis of the nucleotide NDT motif and the randomized change of three amino acids.
• Transfer of the insight towards AdhZ2 and confirmation of the improved behavior using NADH as cofactor.

Biocatalysis is a promising tool for the sustainable production of chemicals. When cofactor depending enzymatic reactions are involved the applicability of the right cofactor is a central issue. One important example in this regard is the production of alcohols by nicotinamide cofactor (NAD(P)+) depending alcohol dehydrogenases. AdhZ3 from Escherichia coli, which is important for the production of alcohols from biomass, has a preference for NADPH as cofactor. We used a structure guided site-specific random approach, to change the cofactor preference towards NADH and to deduce more general rules for redesigning the cofactor specificity. Transfer of a triplet motif from NADH preferring horse liver ADH to AdhZ3 showed an insufficient switch in the preference towards NADH. A combinatorial site saturation mutagenesis altering three residues at once was applied. Library screening with two different cofactor concentrations (0.1 and 0.3 mM) resulted in nine improved variants with AdhZ3-LND having the highest vmax and AdhZ3-CND having the lowest Km. Asparagine was the most frequent amino acid found in eight of nine triplet motifs. To verify the triplet-motif, two variants of E. coli AdhZ2 DIN and LND were designed and confirmed for improved activity with NADH.