The Director of the Bristol BioDesign Institute, Prof Dek Woolfson, will be leading the University of Bristol’s contribution to one of five projects funded through the BBSRC’s strategic Longer and Larger (sLoLa) grants programme, which supports “adventurous fundamental bioscience research at the frontiers of human knowledge”.
The Universities of Bristol and Edinburgh are collaborating on the Enzymatic Photocatalysis project, which will be led by Prof Nigel Scrutton at University of Manchester. This project will “apply a cyclical design-build-evaluate-learn approach to discovering the generalisable principles of photo-biocatalysis.”
The Bristol team will design completely synthetic proteins that trap light and funnel this energy into new enzyme-like activities for generating molecules that are otherwise difficult to make synthetically or biochemically.