Frances Arnold's game-changing technique of "directed evolution" creates enzymes with unusual capabilities. Her own evolution made it possible.

The combination of protein design and directed evolution is a powerful way to create enzymes with new functions. Now, Anthony P. Green and coworkers at the University of Manchester have thrown a ...

An artist’s depiction of an artificially evolved enzyme breaking a silicon-carbon bond. [Caltech/Dow] For the first time, scientists have engineered an enzyme that can break the stubborn man-made ...

Directed evolution—a process in which a protein library is subjected to repeated rounds of mutation and selection to achieve desired properties—can improve the catalytic performance of computationally ...

Chemists created an enzyme with boronic acid at its reactive center. This approach can produce more selective reactions with boron, and allows the use of directed evolution to improve its catalytic ...

Today, the Royal Swedish Academy announced the winners of this year’s Nobel prize for Chemistry: one half goes to Prof. Frances Arnold from the California Institute for Technology, the other half to ...

For the first time, scientists have engineered an enzyme that can break stubborn man-made bonds between silicon and carbon that exist in widely-used chemicals known as siloxanes, or silicones. The ...

Researchers at MIT have made a major breakthrough in optimizing rubisco, a key enzyme in photosynthesis. By modifying a bacterial version of this molecule, they achieved a 25% higher catalytic ...

Enzymes originally evolved in high-temperature environments and later adapted to lower temperatures as Earth cooled. Scientists discovered that a key shift in enzyme function occurred over ...

The thymidine kinase (TK) genes from herpes simplex virus (HSV) types 1 and 2 were recombined in vitro with a technique called DNA family shuffling. A high-throughput robotic screen identified ...

A team of biochemists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed a faster way to identify molecules in the lab that could lead to more effective pharmaceuticals. The discovery advances ...