Engineering Enzymes for Improved Activity at Varying Concentrations of Substrate and Organic Solvent

One of the major problems in the use of enzymes in the industry is their instability under strict process conditions. As the use of organic solvents in industries for hydrophobic substrate solubility or the suppression of water-dependent reactions has become inevitable, the need to engineer enzymes to accommodate the varying solvent conditions and high substrate concentrations has become mandatory for successful biocatalytic reactions. At Kcat Enzymatic we have designed a novel method that combines in-silico modeling of industrial process conditions hybridized with Quantum Molecular Dynamics to engineer enzymes such as alcohol dehydrogenase and a specific reductase to work at varying concentrations of substrates and organic solvents like DMSO and IPA. (In preparation)