Carotenoids, a variety of natural products, have significant pharmaceutical and commercial potential. Phytoene dehydrogenase (CrtI) is the rate-limit enzyme for carotenoid synthesis, whose catalysis specificity results in various carotenoids. However, the structural characteristics of CrtI for controlling the catalysis specificity on dehydrogenation steps are still unclear, which limited the development of CrtI function. Here we confirmed two mutation sites H136 and H453 in the mutant library of CrtI from Blakeslea trispora, which markedly regulated catalytic specificity. Interestingly, the sequence alignment features at H136 and H453 were consistent with the phylogenetic analysis of CrtI families. Subsequently, the functions of saturated mutants at H136 and H453 were clustered by principal component analysis (PCA) and k-means. According to the clustering results, diversiform mutants with specific dehydrogenation function provided important application value for carotenoid product customization. Meanwhile, this study also enriched the theory of enzyme evolution and guided the functional development of enzymes.
Keywords: CrtI; enzyme evolution; multistep dehydrogenation; phytoene dehydrogenase; principal component analysis.