CAZyme discovery and design for sweet dreams

Development of synthetic routes to complex carbohydrates and glyco-conjugates is often hampered by the lack of enzymes with requisite properties or specificities. Indeed, assembly or degradation of carbohydrates requires carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes) able to act on a vast range of glycosidic monomers, oligomers or polymers in a regio-specific or stereo-specific manner in order to produce the desired structure. Sequence-based analyses allow finding the most original enzymes. Novel screening methods have emerged that enable a more efficient exploitation of the CAZyme diversity found in the microbial world or generated by protein engineering. Computational biology methods also play a prominent role in the success of CAZyme design. Such progress allows circumventing current limitations of carbohydrate synthesis and opens new opportunities related to the synthetic biology field.