Hunt for enzymes heats up, a potential boon for biotech and beyond
Mikako Sasa is a prospector. Each weekend near Copenhagen, she grabs her special bag, a few plastic tubes, and heads out to the Denmark countryside to collect dirt and mushrooms. What she really wants are enzymes.
Other prospectors like Sasa scour barnyards or anthills. Some venture to Antarctica. Some drive submersible robots to plunge to deep-sea volcanic vents. All are in search for microorganisms that produce enzymes, in hopes of unfolding the mystery of these substances.
“We’re trying to find useful enzymes that do useful jobs,” is how Jeffrey Gardner, a fellow prospector who roots around in bacteria purchased from a national online library, puts it.
Indeed, the search for novel enzymes — substances that are produced by living organisms and that act as catalysts prompting other substances to react — is booming, in no small part because of cheap and quick genome sequencing. That could fuel advances in biotech and beyond.
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Enzymes are a
