Concept
Enzyme engineering and metabolic engineering can now enable the sustainable biosynthesis of virtually any desired chemical product. This synthetic biology research trend has exploded as a future hope to improve the production of various chemicals and materials. Engineering the microbial production of target compounds requires many steps including synthesis and editing of DNA, construction of host strains, selection of appropriate genes to build optimal metabolic pathways, analysis of metabolites, and scaling up production titers. Among these steps, the discovery and engineering of enzymes is one of the least standardized and automated processes. More importantly, the extension of currently known metabolic pathways to produce new types of valuable compounds completely depends upon the discovery or engineering of specialized enzyme functions. Therefore, the Medicinal Enzyme Engineering Laboratory is established to develop, systematize and apply computational enzyme engineering approaches for the production of medicinal compounds.