Systematic discovery of enzyme promiscuity in Escherichia coli using in vitro metabolomics (opens in new tab)

Metabolic enzymes have traditionally been regarded as highly specific catalysts; however, many can catalyze multiple reactions. To systematically investigate the prevalence of such enzyme promiscuity, we used nontargeted metabolomics to measure dynamic metabolite ion profiles in in vitro assays with 667 successfully purified Escherichia coli enzymes in a natural intracellular metabolome extract. Notably, nearly half of these enzymes elicited significant changes in ion traces. Using a machine ...