ABSTRACT
Enzymes have become essential to the course of modern daily life; they are employed in such diverse fields as food processing, drug synthesis, and they are also found in some washing detergents. Ideally, the enzyme employed exactly matches the characteristics required for its application, although in practice this is quite difficult. Several methods aimed at changing the character of an enzyme were developed (1, 2). In recent years, protein engineering has become an increasingly important tool in the development of novel hybrid enzymes with useful catalytic functions (3). The construction of chimeric enzymes proved to be one of the most sensitive methods used in the study of structure and function relationships in the parent proteins (4-7). In addition, the construction of chimeric enzymes facilitated the progress toward the production of enzymes with improved catalytic activities and thermal stabilities. Several enzymes with improved properties and thermal stabilities have already been produced by gene shuffling experiments and these enzymes also proved useful in mechanistic studies (8, 9).
