Allostery is the most direct, rapid and efficient way of regulating protein function, ranging from the control of metabolic mechanisms to signal-transduction pathways. However, an enormous amount of unsystematic allostery information has deterred scientists who could benefit from this field. Here, we present the AlloSteric Database (ASD), the first online database that provides a central resource for the display, search and analysis of structure, function and related annotation for allosteric molecules. Currently, ASD contains 336 allosteric proteins from 101 species and 8095 modulators in three categories (activators, inhibitors and regulators). Proteins are annotated with a detailed description of allostery, biological process and related diseases, and modulators with binding affinity, physicochemical properties and therapeutic area. Integrating the information of allosteric proteins in ASD should allow for the identification of specific allosteric sites of a given subtype among proteins of the same family that can potentially serve as ideal targets for experimental validation. In addition, modulators curated in ASD can be used to investigate potent allosteric targets for the query compound, and also help chemists to implement structure modifications for novel allosteric drug design. Therefore, ASD could be a platform and a starting point for biologists and medicinal chemists for furthering allosteric research. ASD is freely available at http://mdl.shsmu.edu.cn/ASD/ .

Fucosylated glycoconjugates are involved in a variety of physiological and pathological processes. However, economical production of fucosylated drugs and prebiotic supplements has been hampered by the poor catalytic efficiency of fucosyltransferases. Here, we developed a fluorescence-activated cell sorting system that enables the ultrahigh-throughput screening (>10⁷ mutants/hour) of such enzymes and designed a companion strategy to assess the screening performance of the system. After three rounds of directed evolution, a mutant M32 of the α1,3-FucT from Helicobacter pylori was identified with 6- and 14-fold increases in catalytic efficiency (k_cat/K_m) for the synthesis of Lewis x and 3′-fucosyllactose, respectively. The structure of the M32 mutant revealed that the S45F mutation generates a clamp-like structure that appears to improve binding of the galactopyranose ring of the acceptor substrate. Moreover, molecular dynamic simulations reveal that helix α5, is more mobile in the M32 mutant, possibly explaining its high fucosylation activity.