Nanodot calls this a "major milestone along the protein design path to productive nanosytems and advanced nanotechnology—the design by computational methods of enzymes that catalyze reactions for which biological enzymes do not exist."
From a UCLA press release:
Chemists from 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. . .
”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.”
“Enzymes are such potent catalysts; we want to harness that catalytic ability,” said research co-author Jason DeChancie, an advanced UCLA chemistry graduate student working with Houk’s group. “We want to design enzymes for reactions that naturally occurring enzymes don’t do. There are limits on the reactions that natural enzymes carry out, compared with what we can dream up that enzymes can potentially do.”
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.
It's not yet known whether a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach will be most successful in achieving the goal of molecular manufacturing. Nor can we be sure whether "wet" (in solution) or "dry" (in vacuum) will provide a better pathway. Those questions and many others are still to be answered.
The recently produced Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems, if followed up with further work, could begin to answer those questions, as could several of the Thirty Essential Nanotechnology Studies prepared by CRN.
It may be that protein engineering will provide vital assistance in building the nanoscale structures that eventually will combine to produce the first molecular fabricator. If so, the work described in the study above could prove highly significant.
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