Biocatalyst development for peptide synthesis

Peptides are vital for modern medicine, with complex exemplars found to exhibit important properties including acting as antibiotics, as hormones to control blood sugar, and as molecules to mitigate damage from conditions such as heart attack and stroke. While total chemical synthesis is a powerful technique for making such peptides, it also comes with significant economic and environmental costs, and scale up remains challenging. This project seeks to develop enzymes to enable the synthesis and modification of peptides and to use these enzymes as biocatalysts to assist in the more environmentally friendly production of these molecules. Our interests are particularly focussed on complex peptide modifications, and enabling the use of such engineered biocatalysts to develop peptide libraries for lead development and structure/activity relationship screening. This project is therefore grounded in biochemistry and enzymology, and involves protein chemistry, enzyme design and engineering (both using computational methods and through directed evolution) and screen development.