Local Organizer:

Prof. Dr. Jose M. Palomo

Chemical Biology and Biocatalysis Group. CB

Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry (ICP), The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

 

 

Supported by:

COST ACTION (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)

CA21162 - Establishing a Pan-European Network on Computational Redesign of Enzymes (COZYME)

 

Action Chair: Prof. Marco W. FRAAIJE

Action Vice-Chair: Prof. Andrea MATTEVI

 

Enzymes are essential for life, enabling the required biological chemistry to occur. Owing to their unparalleled chemical and eco-friendly properties, enzymes are also industrially relevant.  Despite their staggering chemical potential, the industrial use of enzymes is lagging behind. This is   mainly because enzymes do not tolerate the conditions of their potential applications. To exploit their industrial use, enzymes have to be improved to withstand these process conditions often with additional tuning of their activity. This is typically accomplished by directed-evolution, which is laborious because it requires the experimental screening of massive mutant libraries to find the desired variants. This has been addressed by the development of computational enzyme engineering tools that show great promise by harnessing the power of a computer to create and screen large virtual libraries or to predict beneficial mutations. This dramatically speeds up and improves the efficiency of a protein redesign campaign. 

This COST Action (COmputationally assisted design of enZYMEs) will provide the interaction and communication, knowledge sharing, training of personnel and of researchers of different disciplines to developing and implementing state-of-the-art computational tools for rapid enzyme improvement. This will solve a key bottleneck in biotechnology: the exploitation of industrially relevant enzymes.