Chemists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Washington have succeeded in creating "designer enzymes," a major milestone in computational chemistry and protein engineering.  The research, by a UCLA chemistry group led by professor Kendall Houk and a Washington group headed by biochemist David Baker, is reported March 19 in the advance online publication of the journal Nature. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) supported the study.
 
Designer enzymes will have applications for defense against biological warfare, by deactivating pathogenic biological agents, and for creating more effective medications, according to Houk.
 
"The design of new enzymes for reactions not normally catalyzed in nature is finally feasible," Houk said. "The goal of our research is to use computational methods to design the arrangement of groups inside a protein to cause any desired reaction to occur."

Combining chemistry, mathematics and physics, the scientists report in the Nature paper that they have successfully created designer enzymes for a chemical reaction known as the Kemp elimination, a non-natural chemical transformation in which hydrogen is pulled off a carbon atom.

Release date: March 19, 2008
Source: University of California, Los Angeles