CoE Distinguished Speaker Lecture Series by Prof Frances H. ARNOLD from Caltech, USA

CoE Distinguished Speaker Lecture Series 

- Lecture by Prof Frances H. ARNOLD  at LT8 (NS1-02-01), 11am on 26 Jan 2018, Friday. 

Prof Frances H. ARNOLD

Linus Pauling Professor 
Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry 
California Institute of Technology, USA 
Director 
Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center

Title: Innovation by Evolution: Bringing New Chemistry to Life

Abstract: Producing fuels and chemicals from renewable resources using genetically-programmed organisms promises a sustainable approach to making many products needed in our daily lives. Not satisfied with nature’s vast catalyst repertoire, we want to create new ones and expand the space of genetically encoded enzyme functions. I will describe how we can use the most powerful biological design process, evolution, to optimize existing enzymes and invent new ones, thereby circumventing our profound ignorance of how sequence encodes function. Mimicking nature’s evolutionary tricks and using a little chemical intuition, we can generate whole new enzyme families that catalyze important reactions, including ones not known in biology. These new chemical capabilities increase the scope of molecules and materials we can build using synthetic biology.