A team from the University of Washington led by Nobel laureate David Baker is using artificial intelligence to design effective enzymes from scratch — an accomplishment the researchers call “one of science’s grand challenges.”
Enzymes are the wizards of the natural world, proteins that can transform molecules and rapidly accelerate chemical reactions under mild conditions. They’re found in every living cell and are essential to life. Enzymes are already being harnessed for drug production and industrial processes. The newly developed tools for enzyme creation could unlock wide-ranging applications.
“Now we can make these enzymes tailored to any reaction of interest, theoretically,” said Anna Lauko, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Baker’s lab. “It’s sort of flipped the way that we would do enzyme design.”
Lauko is a co-lead author of a research paper being published today in the journal Science. Her co-leads are Sam Pellock, an acting instructor in the lab, and Kiera Sumida, one of Baker’s graduate students.
Last year Baker, a biochemist and director of the Institute for Protein Design at UW Medicine, won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work unraveling the molecular design of proteins and developing technologies for using AI to build and test new ones.
In the past, scientists made Frankenstein enzymes, stitching together components of existing proteins in the hope that the assembled parts could manage a precise task. But enzymes often need to perform nuanced operations, changing shapes multiple times as they manipulate molecules.
