May 23
Chemistry Department Seminar: Anna Lauko '19
University of Washington, Seattle - Baker's Lab
"Computational design of serine hydrolases"
Despite significant recent advancements in protein design, the generation of artificial enzymes with comparable catalytic activity to those in Nature remains extremely challenging. Enzymes accelerate the chemical reactions that sustain life using complex molecular architectures that are difficult to accurately design from scratch. New AI tools for protein design have the potential to address this challenge and revolutionize enzyme design. In this talk, I will describe how we applied two new computational tools, RFdiffusion and PLACER, to enable the design of serine esterases with high structural accuracy. We believe our approach will be broadly applicable to the design of new catalysts such as PETases, amidases, and ligases in the future.
*This seminar counts towards the chemistry major seminar attendance requirement