Artificial Metalloenzyme

The noble metal indium, with its 49 electrons, is not found in living systems and thus assumed not to have a biological role. However, chemists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been able to substitute indium for iron in myoglobin and produce enzymatic activity never seen before—perhaps opening the way for artificial metalloenymes in drug development. As the lead chemist in this work says: “We’ve synthetically changed a protein to give it the functionality of a chemical catalyst while keeping in enough of the biology to allow us to use methods of molecular biology to evolve new functions. The long-term potential of this approach seems limitless.”   MORE

Image Credit: John Hartwig Group/Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley and ScienceDaily.com