Publications
Improvements of biomass deconstruction enzymes
Sandia National Laboratories and DSM Innovation, Inc. collaborated on the investigation of the structure and function of cellulases from thermophilic fungi. Sandia's role was to use its expertise in protein structure determination and X-ray crystallography to solve the structure of these enzymes in their native state and in their substrate and product bound states. Sandia was also tasked to work with DSM to use the newly solved structure to, using computational approaches, analyze enzyme interactions with both bound substrate and bound product; the goal being to develop approaches for rationally designing improved cellulases for biomass deconstruction. We solved the structures of five cellulases from thermophilic fungi. Several of these were also solved with bound substrate/product, which allowed us to predict mutations that might enhance activity and stability.