Progress towards engineering restriction enzymes

    Researchers at Mount Sinai Medical have made recent progress with engineering restriction enzymes. The enzyme used was Mmel which comes from the bacteria Methylophilus methylotrophus. This is used to protect bacteria from foreign DNA. Mmel has a large distance between restriction site and the cleavage site. The bi-functional Mmel (Rease and Mtase share the same target recognition domain).

   Being able to engineer restriction enzymes is going to be a huge advantage in the future , expanding the use of RM systems will allow them to be used in more specific circumstances. The constraints of molecular biology will be lessened to a big degree once this sort of engineering starts advancing.

This article can be found here and more information on RM enzyme can be found here