Chemists at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA) have reported the successful development of 'designer enzymes,' a major breakthrough in computational chemistry and protein engineering.

The UCLA chemistry team, led by professor Kendall Houk and a Washington group headed by biochemist David Baker, reports that it combined chemistry, mathematics and physics to effectively create designer enzymes for a chemical reaction known as the Kemp elimination, a non-natural chemical transformation in which hydrogen is pulled off a carbon atom.

Houk said that the enzymes could prove useful for defence against biological warfare, by deactivating pathogenic biological agents, and for developing more efficient medications.

'The design of new enzymes for reactions not normally catalyzed in nature is finally feasible. The goal of our research is to use computational methods to design the arrangement of groups inside a protein to cause any desired reaction to occur,' Nature quoted Houk, as saying.

Research co-author Jason DeChancie, an advanced UCLA chemistry graduate student working with Houk's group, said: 'Enzymes are such potent catalysts; we want to harness that catalytic ability. We want to design enzymes for reactions that naturally occurring enzymes don't do. There are limits on the reactions that natural enzymes carry out, compared with what we can dream up that enzymes can potentially do.'

In a previous paper, published in the journal Science on March 7, the chemists reported another successful chemical reaction that uses designer enzymes to catalyze a retro-aldol reaction, which involves breaking a carbon-carbon bond. The aldol reaction is a key process in living organisms associated with the processing and synthesis of carbohydrates.