“…Thus far, structures of the catalytic domains of cellulases and xylanases from seven of the families have been published: cellobiohydrolase II (CBH-II) from Trichoderma reesei (Rouvinen, Bergfors, Teeri, Knowles & Jones, 1990) and endocellulase E2 from Thermomonospora fusca (Spezio, Wilson & Karplus, 1993), both from family 6; CelA from Clostridium thermocellum (Juy et al, 1992) a representative of family 9; the endoglucanase V from H. insolens (this paper and, Davies et al, 1993) from family 45; cellobiohydrolase I (CBH-I) from T. reesei (Divne et al, 1994), family 7; a number of family 11 xylanases (Campbell et al, 1993;Wakarchuk, Campbell, Sung, Davoodi & Yaguchi, 1994;TOrr/Snen, Harkki & Rouvinen, 1994); the family 10 xylanases (Derewenda et al, 1994;Harris et al, 1994;White, Withers, Gilkes & Rose, 1994) and most recently CelCCA, a cellulase from family 5 (Ducros et al, 1996). Although all of these structures facilitate catalysis via a similar acid/base mechanism involving two or more aspartate or glutamate residues (for reviews on these mechanisms of catalysis see Koshland, 1953;Sinnott, 1990, McCarter & Withers, 1994, the structures of the cellulases from each family may be quite distinct.…”