A growth-based screening strategy for engineering the catalytic activity of an oxygen-sensitive formate dehydrogenase

Enzyme engineering is a powerful tool for improving or altering the properties of biocatalysts for industrial, research, and therapeutic applications. Fast and accurate screening of variant libraries is often the bottleneck of enzyme engineering and may be overcome by growth-based screening strategies with simple processes to enable high throughput. The currently available growth-based screening strategies have been widely employed for enzymes but not yet for catalytically potent and oxygen-sensitive metalloenzymes. Here, we present a screening system that couples the activity of an oxygen-sensitive formate dehydrogenase to the growth of Escherichia coli. This system relies on the complementation of the E. coli formate hydrogenlyase (FHL) complex by Mo-dependent formate dehydrogenase H (EcFDH-H). Using an EcFDH-Hdeficient strain, we demonstrate that growth inhibition by acidic glucose fermentation products can be alleviated by FHL complementation. This allows the identification of catalytically active EcFDH-H variants at a readily measurable cell density readout, reduced handling efforts, and a low risk of oxygen contamination. Furthermore, a good correlation between cell density and formate oxidation activity was established using EcFDH-H variants with variable catalytic activities. As proof of concept, the growth assay was employed to screen a library of 1,032 EcFDH-H variants and reduced the library size to 96 clones. During the subsequent colorimetric screening of these clones, the variant A12G exhibiting an 82.4% enhanced formate oxidation rate was identified. Since many metal-dependent formate dehydrogenases and hydrogenases form functional complexes resembling E. coli FHL, the demonstrated growth-based screening strategy may be adapted to components of such electron-transferring complexes.