Congratulations to Samer Saleh and the team on their new publication, “A sequence motif enables widespread use of noncanonical redox cofactors in natural enzymes,” published in Nature Chemical Biology!

The study discovered a conserved amino acid sequence motif, RH/QxxR, that enables many natural aldehyde dehydrogenases to use noncanonical redox cofactors. Introducing this motif into other aldehyde dehydrogenases also increased their nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN⁺) activity.

Access full paper:
Saleh S, Hsu NH, Luu E, Martin VC, Ng HJC, Black WB, Zhang S, Kim JK, Sankaran B, Tran AHT, Hayes RL, Siegel JB, Qiao F, and Li H. A sequence motif enables widespread use of noncanonical redox cofactors in natural enzymes. Nat Chem Biol, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41589-026-02315-w