Researchers have successfully developed brand-new enzymes using artificial intelligence, which can effectively undergo multi-step reactions important for biological and industrial applications, such as plastic recycling. The team utilized advanced machine-learning techniques to enhance the design, achieving a remarkable improvement in efficacy — new enzymes were 60,000 times better at catalyzing a critical four-step chemical process than previous designs. This marks a significant advancement over earlier methods, which struggled with functionality, showcasing the potential of AI in creating enzymes with native-like activity for practical use.
This is a milestone in enzyme engineering," says Huimin Zhao, a synthetic biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "[It] shows that now it's possible to design enzymes with native-like activity that could make them useful practically.
It is like going to the thrift store and buying a suit, and that suit probably won't fit you perfectly. That's what happens when we try to design enzymes that way," says study co-author Anna Lauko.
The new enzymes were 60,000 times better at speeding up the reaction than ones previously designed to work in a similar way.,
The researchers started with an AI tool called RFdiffusion, a program they had previously developed to generate enzyme structures.
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