Biotechnology and Bioinformatics
Development of new technology to design highly functional biomaterials
Advances of information technology generate huge amount of data rapidly. Mining of information from the data would be significant challenge for now. To tackle with this task, we try to develop new technology to generate highly functional biomaterials which are applicable to industrial usage.
- 1. Development of novel sequence design method to generate highly functional proteins.
We are now developing new computational tools to design highly functional biomaterials by analyzing a huge amount of DNA or protein sequence data registered in public database. Many of highly functional proteins could be generated by the collaboration researches.
- 2. Establishment of enzymatic synthetic approach of fine chemicals
We try to screen new enzymes metabolizing L-amino acids from sequence database utilizing the developed tools. The screened enzymes are applied to synthesize fine chemicals (such as D-amino acid derivatives) of which precursors are L-amino acids.
- 3. Structural and functional analysis of nuclear receptors
Structural and functional analysis for several of nuclear receptors (such as RXRα and PPARs) are performed by combinational analysis of X-ray crystallography, computational chemical and biochemical approaches.
- Figure 1
- Structure and functional analysis of new L-amino acid oxidase (ArtLAAO) assigned by in silico enzyme screening. ArtLAAO can apply to synthesize enantio-pure D-amino acid derivatives from L- or racemic amino acid derivatives (ACS Catal., 2019, Commun. Chem., 2020).
- Figure 2
- Molecular mechanism of selective PPARα modulator, pemafibrate. We can elucidate molecular mechanism why pemafibrate can form stable interaction with ligand binding domain of PPARα (IJMS, 2020).
References
- Commun. Chem. 3(1), 181, (2020)
- Biochemistry, 59(40), 3823-3833, (2020)
- IJMS, 21(1), 361, (2020)
- ACS Catalysis, 9(11), 10152-10158, (2019)
- J. Chem. Inf. Model., 59(1), 25-30, (2019)