A new startup led by a University of Chicago biochemistry researcher is designing artificial proteins that could result in major innovations for agriculture, energy, therapeutics and other industries.
The university announced this week that Rama Ranganathan, a researcher in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at UChicago, has launched Evozyne, a startup that's creating artificial proteins.
The startup has created machine-learning models that review protein information from genome databases, and found a simple method for building artificial proteins that are important for life in bacteria, fungi and plants. The team created synthetic genes to encode for the proteins, cloned them into bacteria, and saw that the bacteria then made the synthetic proteins that had the same catalytic function as the natural proteins, the university said.
The lab-created proteins performed chemistries so well that they "rivaled those found in nature," the university said.
Evozyne’s technology has a range of industry applications, including creating custom proteins that increase the efficiency of energy sources, develop new therapeutics to treat diseases, combat pests in agriculture without using harmful chemicals, and improve the environmental footprint of man-made chemical processes.
“We found that genome data contains enormous amounts of information about the basic rules of protein structure and function, and now we’ve been able to bottle nature’s rules to create proteins ourselves," Ranganathan said in a statement. “This system gives us a platform for rationally engineering protein molecules in a way that we always dreamed we could."
Ranganathan co-founded the startup with Andrew Ferguson, and has worked with UChicago’s Polsky Center to file patents and license the IP.
