Project description
Innovative kits reduce time and cost of enzyme engineering
CCatalysts, the essential and ubiquitous helpers of chemical reactions, speed up the rate at which a reaction progresses, enabling commercially relevant volumes of product. Enzymes are nature’s catalysts, proteins that speed up chemical reactions in living organisms. Aside from being biodegradable, non-toxic and able to perform their jobs under mild conditions, enzymes are also highly efficient, specific and selective. However, engineering nature’s workhorses to produce the desired product required for industrial relevance is quite challenging. Funded by the European Research Council, the KITZYME project will create a spin-off to exploit its rationally designed enzyme kits, leveraging its computational approach that can increase catalytic efficiency up to a thousand-fold relative to the natural enzyme.
Objective
Enzymes exhibit high efficiency, specificity, selectivity, biodegradability, non-toxicity, and the ability to function effectively under gentle biological conditions. These qualities render enzymes a sustainable and eco-friendly substitute for traditional catalysts within industrial settings. However, harnessing enzymes for industrial applications often necessitates extensive and costly experimental engineering efforts. Computational methods hold promise as potential solutions, but these have not yet demonstrated the ability to rapidly design highly efficient enzymes that mimic those found in Nature. As opposed to other methods, our computational approach developed in the previous ERC-STG can introduce active site and distal mutations that modulate the enzyme conformational dynamics, achieving increases in catalytic efficiency of up to 1000-fold. This project aims to exploit the proprietary technology developed in ERC-STG and ERC-POC for generating a set of patentable rationally designed enzyme kits focused on stereoselective carbon-carbon bond formation. KITZYME aims to create a spin-off for the exploitation of the new set of rationally designed enzyme kits as well as the proprietary technology developed for enzyme optimization. Both the enzyme kits and our technology are the cornerstone of the project, and will provide industries with a cost-effective, scalable, and environmentally sustainable solution.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsmutation
- natural scienceschemical sciencescatalysis
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteinsenzymes
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC-POC - HORIZON ERC Proof of Concept GrantsHost institution
17004 Girona
Spain