Pluskal Lab

Research focus

ERC Consolidator Grant · 2024

Decoding the Biochemistry of Terpene Synthases

Enzymes are biological catalysts indispensable for biotechnology. Conventional approaches to enzyme design and optimization, relying on biochemical intuition and combinatorial mutagenesis, have yielded significant success over decades. Building on these foundations, the TerpenCode project aims to instantly elucidate and engineer enzymatic reactions by designing a new generation of deep learning models that (1) incorporate biochemical principles as inductive biases and (2) model all intermediate biochemical transformations that occur sequentially in the active site of each enzyme. We will focus on terpene synthases, which produce the core hydrocarbon scaffolds of terpenoids, the largest and…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.