Tongtong Zhou, Yan Wang, Yuan-Yuan Liu, Tingting Li, Chenxi Lou, Jiewen Deng, Haifang Wang, Aoneng Cao
An artificial phosphatase, GoldAP, is rationally designed by installation of a metal-binding site onto a natural protein fragment to form a well-defined active centre on gold nanoparticles. GoldAP efficiently catalyses the hydrolysis of p-nitrophenyl phosphate in seconds with a kcat that is higher than that of Escherichia coli alkaline phosphatase.