Dept of Biotechnology & Enzyme Catalysis of the Institute of Biochemistry at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University Greifswald and Polyclone Bioservices announced a joint research project to engineer transaminase enzymes to broaden their substrate scope as these biocatalysts are very useful to make chiral compounds for the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. The joint research project will be headed by Prof Uwe Bornscheuer and an application for funding has been submitted. The joint research project will leverage Polyclone’s in silico enzyme engineering framework (eEF) to predict suitable modifications and Prof. Bornscheuer’s group’s in vitro expertise on transaminase enzymes to validate the in silico predictions.
“This collaboration will strengthen our research on engineering transaminases as Polyclone’s advanced computational tools will substantially help us in understanding different transition states of the enzyme to guide improvement of these very important biocatalysts,” said Bornscheuer.
“This collaboration creates a fruitful feedback loop: Polyclone will predict how we can improve our enzymes, and we will check this experimentally. The results will help us in deepening our understanding of the transaminases, and Polyclone to validate and further strengthen their computer modeling algorithms,” said Jun.-Prof. Matthias Höhne.
“The advances in molecular modeling and molecular dynamics techniques have been underutilised when it comes to understanding the behavior of biocatalysts. Many conformational and quantum mechanics attributes like reaction coordinates of the transition states, electrostatic potential, pi-pi interactions and many more such descriptors provide an insight into the enzyme mechanism like never before. We hope this collaboration will address many such challenges in the future and help pave the way for better productivity of critical enzymes,” said Naveen Kulkarni, Chief Executive Officer, Polyclone.
EP News Bureau – Mumbai