Computational Redesign of Acyl-ACP Thioesterase with Improved Selectivity toward Medium-Chain-Length Fatty Acids.

Enzyme and metabolic engineering offer the potential to develop biocatalysts for converting natural resources into a wide range of chemicals. To broaden the scope of potential products beyond natural metabolites, methods of engineering enzymes to accept alternative substrates and/or perform novel chemistries must be developed. DNA synthesis can create large libraries of enzyme-coding sequences, but most biochemistries lack a simple assay to screen for promising enzyme variants.

The Iterative Protein Redesign and Optimization (IPRO) suite of programs.

Proteins are an important class of biomolecules with applications spanning across biotechnology and medicine. In many cases, native proteins must be redesigned to improve various performance metrics by changing their amino acid sequences. Algorithms can help sharpen protein library design by focusing the library on sequences that optimize computationally accessible proxies.

A framework to integrate habitat monitoring and restoration with endangered insect recovery.

Monitoring is essential to track the long-term recovery of endangered species. Greater emphasis on habitat monitoring is especially important for taxa whose populations may be difficult to quantify (e.g.

OptZyme: computational enzyme redesign using transition state analogues.

OptZyme is a new computational procedure for designing improved enzymatic activity (i.e., kcat or kcat/KM) with a novel substrate.