Award details

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

Reference	BB/S004955/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Douglas Kell
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Andrew Currin, Dr Neil Swainston
Institution	University of Liverpool
Department	Functional and Comparative Genomics
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	201,893
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/05/2019
End date	31/08/2021
Duration	28 months

Abstract

unavailable

Summary

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.

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Industrial Biotechnology, Structural Biology, Synthetic Biology, Technology and Methods Development
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	Follow-On Fund (FOF) [2004-2015]
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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