GeneORator: a novel and high-throughput method for the synthetic biology-based improvement of any enzyme

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Enzymes have significant uses in biotechnology, for instance as components of 'biological' washing powders. The total enzyme market is large, some $8Bn per year.Natural enzymes are normally very poor. We can improve them by changing their sequences. However, this still scales as powers of their size: for 14 residues the number is greater than the lifetime in s of the known Universe (~100,000,000,000,000,000). We have a new method that allows one to do this additively (for 14 residues it is just 280 examples). This allows us to study the possible variants MUCH more effectively; with one enzyme we have made a variant that is 1210 times quicker than the starting enzyme.However, we now need to show that this was not a 'fluke' by demonstrating our methods on a series of other enzymes, and, as well as automating our methods using robots, this is what this project will do. This should get us to a state where we can attract sufficient investment to commercial our discoveries properly.