In the future it will be possible to create enzymes to produce artificial cells.
A team of chemists under the direction Arieh warshel (Arieh Warshel of the University of southern California have developed a method to predict catalytic activity of various enzymes. In the future it will allow to create enzymes with desired properties for industrial production and also to produce artificial cells. The article details scientific work, published in The Journal of Chemical Physics.
Enzymes play an important role in most biological processes: the receipt and transfer of energy, transcription and translation of genetic material, as well as the transmission of signals. Enzymes are biological catalysts, speeding up biochemical reactions by many orders of magnitude, ensuring the correct functioning of living cells. However, the fundamental reasons for the catalytic power of enzymes is still remained a mystery.
A new approach that combines classical and quantum physics, allows us to determine, what allows to proceed the enzymatic reaction. The method is based on models of complex chemical systems, for which Warshel received the 2013 Nobel prize. The reaction proceeded, a certain level of free energy. On free energy to influence the physical factors. Their values can vary widely, which leads to a decrease or increase of the free energy. Thereby is created a kind of landscape, where the tops of the hillocks correspond to the maxima of the energy, and valley — lows.
To test what factors matter, scientists have modeled the effect of conformational changes of enzymes (in other words, changing their geometric structure), as well as their chemical and physical properties. In comparison, the chemists studied the chemical reactions without enzymes. It turned out that the key factor for catalytic activity of enzymes is the potential difference between reactants and reaction products.
The model allows us to predict what should be the enzymes in order to achieve a suitable potential difference for the reaction. So it is possible to adapt the proteins for the catalysis of chemical and biochemical processes in industrial scale.
