N-acetylneuraminic acid (Neu5Ac) based novel pharmaceutical agents and diagnostic reagents are highly required in medical fields. However, N-acetylneuraminate lyase（NAL）for Neu5Ac synthesis is not applicable for industry due to its low catalytic efficiency. In this study, we biochemically characterized a deep-sea NAL enzyme (abbreviated form: MyNal) from a symbiotic Mycoplasma inhabiting the stomach of a deep-sea isopod, Bathynomus jamesi. Enzyme kinetic studies of MyNal showed that it exhibited a very low Km for both cleavage and synthesis activities compared to previously described NALs. Though it favors the cleavage process, MyNal out-competes the known NALs with respect to the efficiency of Neu5Ac synthesis and exhibits the highest kcat/Km values. High expression levels of recombinant MyNal could be achieved (9.56 mol L-1 culture) with a stable activity in a wide pH (5.0-9.0) and temperature (40-60 °C) range. All these features indicated that the deep-sea NAL has potential in the industrial production of Neu5Ac. Furthermore, we found that the amino acid 189 of MyNal (equivalent to Phe190 in Escherichia coli NAL), located in the sugar-binding domain, GX189DE, was also involved in conferring its enzymatic features. Therefore, the results of this study improved our understanding of the NALs from different environments and provided a model for protein engineering of NAL for biosynthesis of Neu5Ac.
Keywords: N-acetylneuraminate lyase; N-acetylneuraminic acid; Symbiotic microbe; mycoplasma.