International Centre for Enzyme Design (ICED)

生物催化是一种可持续的技术，它利用大自然的催化剂(即酶)的力量来进行化学反应。酶价格低廉，可生物降解，由可再生原料生产，在环境友好的反应条件下运行，并以显著的效率和选择性加快化学过程。出于这些原因，化工和制药行业经常在商业制造过程中使用某些类别的酶来取代低效和/或具有高环境负担的化学转化。例如，工程酶现在被用于生产药物和农用化学品，回收塑料和从大气中捕获二氧化碳，从而促进更有效和更可持续的化学工业。然而，自然界中发现的酶通常不适合用于工业应用，必须首先进行优化，以提高催化效率、选择性和稳定性等性能。定向进化是一种强大而通用的技术，可以使酶适应商业过程，但这是一个昂贵和耗时的过程，需要只有少数几个实验室才能获得的专业仪器。此外，许多化学过程使用非自然反应，没有已知的酶可以作为优化的起始模板。在这项应用中，我们将建立国际酶设计中心(ICED)，将计算蛋白质设计、酶工程和工业生物催化领域的世界领先企业聚集在一起，以改变未来工业生物催化剂的发展方式。ICE将建立一个完全集成的计算和实验计划，将最新的深度学习蛋白质设计工具与先进的酶工程实验方法相结合，以实现具有广泛有用活性的新的和改进的酶的可靠和可预测的设计。通过这种方式，ICED将提供该领域所需的阶段性变化，以便能够快速设计定制的生物催化剂，以响应不同的社会需求。

Biocatalysis is a sustainable technology that harnesses the power of Nature's catalysts, known as enzymes, to perform chemical reactions. Enzymes are inexpensive, biodegradable, produced from renewable feedstocks, operate under environmentally benign reaction conditions and speed up chemical processes with remarkable efficiency and selectivity. For these reasons, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries routinely use certain classes of enzymes in commercial manufacturing processes to replace chemical transformations that are inefficient and/or have a high environmental burden. For example, engineered enzymes are now used to produce pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals, recycle plastics and capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus contributing to a more efficient and sustainable chemical industry. However, enzymes found in Nature are usually not suitable for use in industrial applications and must first be optimized to improve properties such as catalytic efficiency, selectivity, and stability. Directed evolution is a powerful and versatile technology for adapting enzymes to make them suitable for use in commercial processes, but it is a costly and time-consuming process that requires specialist instrumentation only available in a handful of labs. Moreover, many chemical processes use non-natural reactions for which there are no known enzymes that can serve as starting templates for optimization. In this application, we will establish The International Centre for Enzyme Design (ICED), bringing together world leaders in computational protein design, enzyme engineering and industrial biocatalysis, to change the way that industrial biocatalysts are developed in the future. ICED will establish a fully integrated computational and experimental program, integrating the latest deep learning protein design tools with advanced experimental methods for enzyme engineering, to allow the reliable and predictable design of new and improved enzymes with a wide range of useful activities. In this way, ICED will deliver a step-change needed in the field to allow the rapid design of customized biocatalysts in response to diverse societal needs.