Accelerated directed evolution of dye-decolorizing peroxidase using a bacterial extracellular protein secretion system (BENNY)

BACKGROUND: Dye-decolorizing peroxidases (DyPs) are haem-containing peroxidases that show great promises in industrial biocatalysis and lignocellulosic degradation. Through the use of Escherichia coli osmotically-inducible protein Y (OsmY) as a bacterial extracellular protein secretion system (BENNY), we successfully developed a streamlined directed evolution workflow to accelerate the protein engineering of DyP4 from Pleurotus ostreatus strain PC15. RESULT: After 3 rounds of random mutagenesis with error-prone polymerase chain reaction (epPCR) and 1 round of saturation mutagenesis, we obtained 4D4 variant (I56V, K109R, N227S and N312S) that displays multiple desirable phenotypes, including higher protein yield and secretion, higher specific activity (2.7-fold improvement in k(cat)/K(m)) and higher H(2)O(2) tolerance (sevenfold improvement based on IC(50)). CONCLUSION: To our best knowledge, this is the first report of applying OsmY to simplify the directed evolution workflow and to direct the extracellular secretion of a haem protein such as DyP4. [Image: see text] ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s40643-019-0255-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.