Investigation of decontamination of nerve agents using organophosphorus hydrolase

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

To improve the decontamination method at chemical terrorism, we attempted to apply organophosphorus hydrolase(OPH) for degrading the nerve agent, such as sarin or VX. We attempted to introduce point mutation in OPH gene in order to construct the OPH enzyme that can hydrolyze nerve agents efficiently. Five types of mutant OPH enzymes were constructed, and studied for the higher degradation activity for the nerve agents. The activity assay proved that the substitution of Tyr at 254 to His lead to the remarkable improvement of the activity toward VX that could not be decomposed by the wild-type OPH. We also tried to develop an OPH-immobilized column for efficient nerve agent decontamination and the immobilized OPH was able to degrade nerve agents. Our results suggest the possibility for developing a powerful and ecological nerve agent detoxication system using OPH.