Abstract: The present invention relates to a method for the production of a variant lipid acyltransferase comprising the steps of: (i) selecting a parent enzyme which is a lipid acyltranserase enzyme; (ii) modifying one or more amino acids to produce a variant lipid acyltransferase; (iii) testing the activity of the variant lipid acyltransferase on a galactolipid and/or phospholipid and/or triglyceride substrate; (iv) selecting a variant enzyme with enhanced activity towards galactolipids compared with the parent enzyme; (v) providing a Bacillus licheniformis cell; (vi) transforming the Bacillus licheniformis cell with a heterologous nucleotide sequence encoding said variant lipid acyltransferase; and (iii) expressing said variant lipid acyltransferase in the cell under the control of a promoter sequence. The variant lipid acyltransferase can undergo post-translations modification, truncation and/or clipping, i.e., to remove a signal peptide.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a method of producing a variant lipid acyltransferase enzyme comprising: (a) selecting a parent enzyme which is a lipid acyltransferase enzyme characterised in that the enzyme comprises the amino acid sequence motif GDSX, wherein X is one or more of the following amino acid residues L, A, V, I, F, Y, H, Q, T N, M or S; (b) modifying one or more amino acids to produce a variant lipid acyltransferase; (c) testing the variant lipid acyltransferase for activity on a galactolipid substrate, and optionally a phospholipid substrate and/or optionally a triglyceride substrate; (d) selecting a variant enzyme with an enhanced activity towards galactolipids compared with the parent enzyme; and optionally (e) preparing a quantity of the variant enzyme.