A small fungal enzyme could play a significant role in simplifying the development and manufacture of drugs, according to scientists.

The Rice lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Xue Sherry Gao and collaborators isolated a biocatalyst known as CtdE after identifying it as the natural mechanism that controls the chirality — the left- or right-handedness — of compounds produced by the native fungal host.

The open-access study appears in Nature Communications.

Two chiral things are, like hands, alike in structure but cannot perfectly overlap. Because the property is important in designing drugs that bind correctly to their targets, the ability to achieve 100% correct chirality is highly desired, Gao said.

«It’s important because if a pharmaceutical drug has the wrong stereochemistry (chirality in three dimensions), it could become a poison to humans, even if the planar chemical structure is the same,» she said.

Like «left» or «right» orientation in chiral objects, what’s known as a 3S or 3R orientation is determined by a molecule’s stereocenter, a one-atom connection between parts of a molecule, Gao said.

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