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，利用大自然催化剂（称为酶）的力量来进行化学反应。酶价格低廉，可生物降解，由可再生原料生产，在环境友好的反应条件下运行，并以显着的效率和选择性加速化学过程。由于这些原因，化学和制药工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用化学品、回收塑料以及从大气中捕获二氧化碳，从而有助于提高化学工业的效率和可持续性。然而，自然界中发现的酶通常不适合在工业应用中使用，必须首先进行优化以提高催化效率、选择性和稳定性等特性。定向进化是一种强大且多功能的技术，可对酶进行改造，使其适合在商业过程中使用，但这是一个成本高昂且耗时的过程，需要只有少数实验室才有的专业仪器。此外，许多化学过程使用非自然反应，没有已知的酶可以作为优化的起始模板。在这个应用中，我们将建立国际酶设计中心（ICED），汇集计算蛋白质设计、酶工程和工业生物催化领域的世界领先者，以改变未来工业生物催化剂的开发方式。 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质设计工具与先进的酶工程实验方法相结合，从而能够可靠且可预测地设计具有广泛有用活性的新型和改进的酶。通过这种方式，ICED 将实现该领域所需的重大变革，以便快速设计定制生物催化剂，以满足不同的社会需求。