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AI pro enzymy: Jak pochopit chemii přírody - a překonat ji
- Matouš Soldát
Popis
Enzymes are the molecular machines that make the chemistry of life possible. They accelerate reactions by orders of magnitude with remarkable specificity. Far beyond the living cell, they are workhorses of biotechnology, drug discovery, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology, often producing valuable compounds more cleanly and sustainably than synthetic chemistry can, or ones that are prohibitively hard to synthesize. Conveniently for us, an enzyme is fully specified by a string: its sequence of amino acids. We already have millions of these sequences on record, yet no analytical way to look at one and say if it’s an enzyme and which reaction it catalyzes. The mapping from sequence to function is real but not something a human can derive by inspection. This makes enzymes a natural fit for machine learning, which provides a way both to predict the function of natural enzymes, mining nature for valuable chemistry, and to generate novel enzymes designed to produce molecules of interest. The hands-on part will let you try one of the best-known prediction models yourself.