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

酶在生物技术中有重要的用途，例如作为“生物”洗衣粉的成分。整个酶市场规模很大，每年约为80亿美元。天然酶通常很差。我们可以通过改变它们的序列来改进它们。然而，这仍然是它们大小的幂次：对于14个残数，这个数字大于已知宇宙的寿命（~100,000,000,000,000,000）。我们有一个新的方法，可以做这个加法（对于14个残数，它只是280个例子）。这使我们能够更有效地研究可能的变体；用一种酶，我们制造了一种比初始酶快1210倍的变体。然而，我们现在需要通过在一系列其他酶上展示我们的方法来证明这不是一个“侥幸”，并且，以及使用机器人自动化我们的方法，这就是这个项目将要做的。这将使我们达到一种状态，我们可以吸引足够的投资来适当地将我们的发现商业化。

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.