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, selection of appropriate genes to build optimal metabolic pathways and analysis of metabolites. 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.
Structure-based design of key amino acid substitutions to improve enzyme function.
Utilizing machine learning to accelerate the directed evolutions of enzymes with novel functions.
Enzyme biocatalysis offers sustainable and efficient pathways for drug discovery and production.
Noriyuki SHIOURA (B4),
NIRANNJHEENI ALAGAPPAN (B4),
and Satoshi YUZAWA (B4)
gave poster presentations at the
“18th Symposium on Biorelevant Chemistry”.
NIRANNJHEENI ALAGAPPAN gave an oral presentation at the "Japanese Society for Biotechnology".
Noriyuki SHIOURA (B3),
NIRANNJHEENI ALAGAPPAN (B3),
and Satoshi YUZAWA (B3)
have joined our lab!
An oral presentation, Machine learning discovery of specialized enzymes for the biosynthesis of aromatic plant compounds, was given at the “48th Annual Meeting of the Pesticide Society of Japan”.
Mrs. Yuko Murakami has joined
the lab
as our administrative assistant!