How enzymes can help create a sustainable future, faster.

Influenced by classic sci-fi iconography and futuristic 1990s music videos, many of us can often have grand technological ideas about what the future may look like. From jet packs to hover cars and self-tying trainers, these imagined worlds frequently centre on the fantastic. But there’s one fantastic innovation that rarely gets a look-in: the evolution of enzyme technologies.

Granted, these pernickety proteins are hardly the stuff of fantasy utopias (no one ever pined for an episode of The Jetsons where the family expressed thermo-stable restriction endonucleases in recombinant Escherichia coli cells). And it’s not as if they’re recent discoveries either. Used for thousands of years and famously studied by the likes of 19th century French scientists Louis Pasteur and Anselme Payen, enzymes are now as well understood as biochemical subjects get, and are now getting artificially evolved faster than nature ever could. https://www.scitechnol.com/biochemical-bioprocess-engineering-journal.php

Still, it’s now clear that no future worth its self-shaking salt could be complete without the proper use of these biological catalysts. So you might rightly ask, why will these enzyme technologies become such a phenomenon? If you are a failed sustainable chemist, the answer might just make you green with envy, if you’ll pardon the pun.