Margaux Pinney manipulates an HT-MEK device. Photo courtesy of Margaux Pinney.
Ever wonder how your body digests food, or how some industrial processes become "greener"? The answer often lies with enzymes – nature's microscopic workhorses that speed up vital chemical reactions. A recent study in Science, uses a high-throughput enzymology platform to study nearly 200 different versions of an enzyme called adenylate kinase found in living things that have evolved over billions of years to measure how well each version of the enzyme worked. This allowed scientists to create a comprehensive map showing the enzyme's activity across its evolutionary history.
Researchers, including the College of Chemistry's newest assistant professor of chemistry and QB3-Berkeley faculty affiliate Margaux Pinney, found that even similar enzymes can have dramatically different efficiencies, with highly active versions popping up independently across the evolutionary tree. This complex variability currently stumps even our most advanced computer models, which struggle to predict an enzyme's precise activity based on its sequence alone.
"This work gave us an unprecedented view into how enzymes have evolved across billions of years of evolution," said Pinney. "Information that teaches us how enzymes work and has the potential to train family-specific models that predict enzyme catalytic function from sequence."
But why does this matter to your everyday life? Because unlocking the secrets of enzyme activity is key to a revolution in medicine, industry, and even agriculture. Imagine designing more effective, personalized drugs with fewer side effects, or developing cleaner, more efficient ways to produce everything from biofuels to food. The study points to a powerful future where, by feeding experimental data into advanced AI models, we could precisely engineer enzymes for specific tasks, speeding up the discovery of new treatments, driving sustainable manufacturing, and ultimately improving our health and the world around us.
Imagine a world where precision medicine–a personalized approach to medicine–truly comes to life: By looking at a patient's unique biological makeup (specifically their enzymes), one could identify vital faulty 'worker molecules' and address them therapeutically with designer enzymes to act as a treatment, fixing the problem right at its source for that individual patient. It's a reminder that even the tiniest biological mechanisms hold immense potential for big impact.