De novo enzyme design; plus base editing for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and more

David Baker’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) lab shared in Nature a deep learning approach for developing artificial enzymes via “hallucination” of idealized protein structures with diverse pocket shapes, and their corresponding amino acid sequences. The approach was used to create artificial luciferases that selectively catalyzed the oxidative chemiluminescence of two synthetic luciferin substrates with higher substate specificity than native luciferases, without compromising thermostability.

The method is the latest advance in the growing field of deep learning-driven de novo protein design. The luciferase technology has been licensed to diagnostic biosensor company and IPD spinout Monod Bio Inc...