International Centre for Enzyme Design (ICED)

国际酶设计中心 (ICED)

• 批准号: EP/Z531157/1
• 负责人: Anthony Green
• 金额: $ 162.53万
• 依托单位: University of Manchester
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FZ531157%2F1
• 关键词: International; Centre; Enzyme; Design; ICED

Biocatalysis is a sustainable technology that harnesses the power of Nature's catalysts, known as enzymes, to perform chemical reactions. Enzymes are inexpensive, biodegradable, produced from renewable feedstocks, operate under environmentally benign reaction conditions and speed up chemical processes with remarkable efficiency and selectivity. For these reasons, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries routinely use certain classes of enzymes in commercial manufacturing processes to replace chemical transformations that are inefficient and/or have a high environmental burden. For example, engineered enzymes are now used to produce pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals, recycle plastics and capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus contributing to a more efficient and sustainable chemical industry. However, enzymes found in Nature are usually not suitable for use in industrial applications and must first be optimized to improve properties such as catalytic efficiency, selectivity, and stability. Directed evolution is a powerful and versatile technology for adapting enzymes to make them suitable for use in commercial processes, but it is a costly and time-consuming process that requires specialist instrumentation only available in a handful of labs. Moreover, many chemical processes use non-natural reactions for which there are no known enzymes that can serve as starting templates for optimization. In this application, we will establish The International Centre for Enzyme Design (ICED), bringing together world leaders in computational protein design, enzyme engineering and industrial biocatalysis, to change the way that industrial biocatalysts are developed in the future. ICED will establish a fully integrated computational and experimental program, integrating the latest deep learning protein design tools with advanced experimental methods for enzyme engineering, to allow the reliable and predictable design of new and improved enzymes with a wide range of useful activities. In this way, ICED will deliver a step-change needed in the field to allow the rapid design of customized biocatalysts in response to diverse societal needs.

生物催化是一种可持续技术，可利用自然催化剂（称为酶）进行化学反应的力量。酶是廉价的，可生物降解的，是由可再生原料产生的，在环境良性反应条件下运行，并以显着的效率和选择性加快化学过程。由于这些原因，化学和制药行业通常在商业制造过程中使用某些类别的酶来代替效率低下和/或具有较高环境负担的化学转化。例如，工程酶现在用于生产药品和农业化学物质，回收塑料并从大气中捕获二氧化碳，从而有助于更有效，更可持续的化学工业。但是，自然界中发现的酶通常不适合在工业应用中使用，必须首先优化以提高诸如催化效率，选择性和稳定性等性能。定向Evolution是一种功能强大且通用的技术，用于调整酶以使其适合于商业流程，但这是一个昂贵且耗时的过程，需要仅在少数实验室中提供专业仪器。此外，许多化学过程都使用非天然反应，没有已知的酶可以用作优化的起始模板。在此应用程序中，我们将建立国际酶设计中心（ICED），将计算蛋白设计，酶工程和工业生物催化的世界领导者汇集在一起​​，以改变未来工业生物催化剂的方式。 ICED将建立一个完全集成的计算和实验程序，将最新的深度学习蛋白设计工具与用于酶工程的先进实验方法集成，以允许具有广泛有用活动的新酶的可靠和可预测的新酶设计。这样，ICED将在该领域提供所需的逐步变化，以允许自定义生物催化剂的快速设计，以应对各种社会需求。