Sunday, August 12, 2012
Columbia Hall, Terrace Level (Washington Hilton)
Arzeda's core technology brings the power of computation to solve enzyme design problems. Arzeda has demonstrated the efficacy of the de novo enzyme technology by introducing entirely new active sites and enzyme activities into protein scaffolds. Arzeda's proprietary enzyme design algorithms can be applied to a variety of enzyme and protein design problems, and represents a technological change of mindset and a new addition in the enzyme engineering toolkit.
To complement this successful technique of de novo enzyme design, we have developed an innovative approach – enzyme identification - that leverages computational enzyme design to rapidly engineer enzymes with known catalytic mechanisms for unnatural substrates as well as increasingly demanding transformations and reaction environments. This new technique has been important in the recent design successes for Arzeda. This talk will focus on the computational techniques used and lessons learned in all of these design projects. Coupled with traditional enzyme optimization techniques such as directed evolution and gene shuffling, computional identification and design techniques open new avenues for enzyme engineering and discovery and their expansion into other applications of synthetic biology.