biomolecules Article Structural Studies of HNA Substrate Specificity in Mutants of an Archaeal DNA Polymerase Obtained by Directed Evolution Camille Samson 1, Pierre Legrand 2 , Mustafa Tekpinar 1 , Jef Rozenski 3, Mikhail Abramov 3, Philipp Holliger 4 , Vitor B. Pinheiro 3 , Piet Herdewijn 3 and Marc Delarue 1,* 1 Unit of Structural Dynamics of Biological Macromolecules, UMR 3528 du CNRS, Institut Pasteur, 25–28 rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France;
[email protected] (C.S.); tekpinar@buffalo.edu (M.T.) 2 Division of Biological Sciences, Synchrotron SOLEIL, 91190 Saint Aubin, France;
[email protected] 3 KU Leuven, Rega Institute for Medical Research, Medicinal Chemistry Herestraat, 49-box 1041, 3000 Leuven, Belgium;
[email protected] (J.R.);
[email protected] (M.A.);
[email protected] (V.B.P.);
[email protected] (P.H.) 4 MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge CB2 0QH, UK;
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[email protected] Received: 16 October 2020; Accepted: 2 December 2020; Published: 8 December 2020 Abstract: Archaeal DNA polymerases from the B-family (polB) have found essential applications in biotechnology. In addition, some of their variants can accept a wide range of modified nucleotides or xenobiotic nucleotides, such as 1,5-anhydrohexitol nucleic acid (HNA), which has the unique ability to selectively cross-pair with DNA and RNA. This capacity is essential to allow the transmission of information between different chemistries of nucleic acid molecules. Variants of the archaeal polymerase from Thermococcus gorgonarius, TgoT, that can either generate HNA from DNA (TgoT_6G12) or DNA from HNA (TgoT_RT521) have been previously identified.