Chemzymes are designed molecules emulating the targeting and efficiency of naturally occurring enzymes. Most people know enzymes as an ingredient in detergents but in our bodies enzymes are in charge of decomposing everything we eat, so that our bodies can absorb the nutrients. They also decompose ingested toxins, ensuring that our bodies survive the encounter.
In several important aspects artificial enzymes function in the same way as naturally occurring ones. But where natural enzymes are big and complex, the artificial ones have been pared down to the basics, a benefit because designing chemzymes for targeted tasks should be easier, since fewer parts mean less to go wrong when changing the structure of chemzymes. For enzymes as well as for their artificial counterparts even small changes in structure will have massive consequences for functionality.
Dr. Jeannette Bjerre showing proof of concept for chemzymes neutralizing a natural poison. Credit: University of Copenhagen
In this, enzymes are very much like hand-tools, where scissors and flat nosed pliers look similar but have very different duties. Several known enzymes in the body catalyze more than one million reactions per second when they decompose compounds. There's just one drawback to enzymes - they are extremely fragile.
If an enzyme in our body was to be warmed above sixtyfive degrees centigrade or subjected to organic solvents, they would immediately denature. They unravel and stop functioning. So far no one has succeeded in designing chemzymes that are anywhere near as fast as their naturally occurring cousins, but they are far more resilient.
Man-made enzymes take on heat and solvents without denaturing, so chemzymes can be mass-produced using industrial chemical processes. This is a huge advantage when you need a lot of product in a hurry.
Producing natural enzymes in industrial settings is considerably more time-consuming because they have to be grown. Rather like one grows apples or grain. So the robust and designable compounds may turn out to be just what's needed for a wide variety of jobs, such as in the pharmaceutical industries where the need is massive for chemical compounds which can solve problems that no amount of designing could ever tweak natural ones to work on, which are unaffected by industrial processes, and to top it of, cheap to produce.
"Showing that these molecules are capable of decomposing toxins required vast amounts of work and time. But it's been worth every minute because it proves the general point that it's possible to design artificial enzymes for this class of task", says Bjerre.
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