Cyclodipeptide synthases: a promising biotechnological tool for the synthesis of diverse 2,5-diketopiperazines

Covering: Up to mid-2019Cyclodipeptide synthases (CDPSs) catalyse the formation of cyclodipeptides using aminoacylated-tRNA as substrates. The recent characterization of large sets of CDPSs has revealed that they can produce highly diverse products, and therefore have great potential for use in the production of different 2,5-diketopiperazines (2,5-DKPs). Sequence similarity networks (SSNs) are presented as a new, efficient way of classifying CDPSs by specificity and identifying new CDPS likely to display novel specificities. Several strategies for further increasing the diversity accessible with these enzymes are discussed here, including the incorporation of non-canonical amino acids by CDPSs and use of the remarkable diversity of 2,5-DKP-tailoring enzymes discovered in recent years.