The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering is pleased to present a seminar by faculty member Keith Tyo, titled:
Putting Proteins to Work: Predicting, Engineering, and Exploiting Small Molecule Interactions
Nearly every function a cell performs begins with a protein recognizing a small molecule. By understanding and controlling the interplay between protein sequence and small molecule, we can sense, catalyze, and concentrate a range of molecules for important applications. We have approached this opportunity at three levels: (a) predicting new-to-nature reactions for enzymes, (b) engineering proteins to detect changes in molecules and record that information durably, and (c) exploiting native recognition at process scale to solve problems that physical and chemical methods handle poorly. I will discuss each in turn. On predicting enzymatic reactions, we have devised high throughput approaches to characterize an enzymatic substrate promiscuity and developed machine learning models to extrapolate predictions to untested molecules. On engineering, we converted a DNA polymerase into a molecular recorder that detects ion concentrations over time and writes that information into DNA with minutes resolution.
Most of the talk will cover a new area, exploiting native protein recognition to perform separations: recovering reactive nitrogen from wastewater and valorizing it. Bacteria can concentrate nitrogen 1000-fold using the storage polymer cyanophycin. We have exploited this biosynthesis pathway to generate clean water and cyanophycin as protein feed. Most excitingly, life cycle and techno-economic analysis indicate cyanophycin competes favorably with conventional protein feeds. This work is now moving from bench to pilot scale. Taken together, this work shows that treating molecular recognition as a designable property, predicted, engineered, or exploited, opens routes to chemicals, new recording technologies, and waste remediation that neither biology nor chemistry reaches alone.
Cost: Free
Olivia Wise
Email