AN ENZYME designed on a computer has proved to be highly efficient at performing its intended function. The work is a step towards the creation of designer enzymes for manufacturing chemicals that are expensive or impossible to produce by other means.
Hundreds of natural enzymes are already used in industry. New enzymes, though, can only be created by the slow process of trial and error. 鈥淏ut here we dial information into an equation, and a computer does much of the work,鈥� says Homme Hellinga of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
His team started with the structure of a protein that merely binds to a sugar. Their program explored ways to bestow new powers on the protein. E. coli cells were then genetically engineered to produce the design, which performs the same function as a natural enzyme called triose phosphate isomerase.
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