A promiscuous activity is a non-native activity the enzyme did not evolve to do, but arises due to an accommodating conformation of the active site. However, the main activity of the enzyme is a result not only of selection towards a high catalytic rate towards a particular substrate to produce a particular product, but also to avoid the production of toxic or unnecessary products. For example, if a tRNA syntheses loaded an incorrect amino acid onto a tRNA, the resulting peptide would have unexpectedly altered properties, consequently to enhance fidelity several additional domains are present. Similar in reaction to tRNA syntheses, the first subunit of tyrocidine synthetase (tyrA) from Bacillus brevis adenylates a molecule of phenylalanine in order to use the adenyl moiety as a handle to produce tyrocidine, a cyclic non-ribosomal peptide. When the specificity of enzyme was probed, it was found that it was highly selective against natural amino acids that were not phenylalanine, but was much more tolerant towards unnatural amino acids. Specifically, most amino acids were not catalysed, whereas the next most catalysed native amino acid was the structurally similar tyrosine, but at a thousandth as much as phenylalanine, whereas several unnatural amino acids where catalysed better than tyrosine, namely D-phenylalanine, β-cyclohexyl-L-alanine, 4-amino-L-phenylalanine and L-norleucine.
One peculiar case of selected secondary activity are polymerases and restriction endonucleases, where incorrect activity is actually a result of a compromise between fidelity and evolvability. For example, for restriction endonucleases incorrect activity (star activity) is often lethal for the organism, but a small amount allows new functions to evolve against new pathogens.