Phytic acid (myo-inositol hexakisphosphate) is the major storage form of phosphorus in plants. In order to increase the availability of phytic acid phosphorus in animal feed of monogastric animals like pigs and poultry and, thereby, to reduce the amount phosphate released to the environment, phytases are increasingly used as animal feed supplement. For feed application as for most other technical enzyme applications, an enzyme that is resistant, in particular, to high temperatures is of great advantage. In order to engineer a thermostable phytase, a new thermostabilization concept, the consensus concept, was applied on a collection of 13 known phytases from mesophilic fungi. After the preparation of a sequence alignment of all 13 amino acid sequences, a consensus sequence was calculated using the publicly available computer program PRETTY. The resulting amino acid sequence was backtranslated into a DNA sequence, which was used to generate a synthetic gene that was finally expressed in Hansenula polymorpha. Surprisingly, the unfolding temperature of consensus phytase was increased by 15-22 ºC in comparison to all of its parents. Nevertheless, the enzyme had normal catalytic properties at 37 ºC. When six typical consensus residues were concomitantly introduced into Aspergillus fumigatus phytase, the unfolding temperature of the enzyme was also increased by 4.5 ºC. We, therefore, advocate the consensus concept as a fast, alternative approach for generating stabilized enzyme variants based on a comparison of homologous amino acid sequences from non-thermostable proteins.