The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will receive $495,000 from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) to support research into designing artificial enzymes from June 2022 to May 2025. Dr. Albert Bowers and his team will develop a generalizable strategy for separating substrate binding and catalysis functions into distinct domains for peptide-based enzymes. They will use computational protein design with Rosetta to create interfaces between a substrate recruitment domain and two catalytic domains, quantitatively assessing efficiency gains compared to naive fusions and wild-type counterparts. An innovative mRNA display substrate assay and machine learning methods will evaluate the approach's generalizability and flexibility. If successful, this work could open new opportunities for customizing enzyme function and synthesizing novel peptides and biomaterials.
Generated 1/6/24, 11:59 AM