Background
Enzymes are essential for life, enabling the required biological chemistry to occur. Owing to their unparalleled chemical and eco-friendly properties, enzymes are of great industrial relevance. Numerous applications of enzymes already exist in the food and pharma industries and are even included in laundry detergents. Despite their staggering chemical potential, the industrial usage of enzymes is lagging behind. This is mainly because many enzymes do not tolerate the conditions of their potential applications. To exploit their possible industrial use, enzymes must be engineered to withstand these process conditions, often with the additional tuning of their activity. This is typically accomplished via directed evolution, which is laborious as it requires the experimental screening of massive mutant libraries to find desired variants. This has been addressed by computational enzyme engineering tools that show great promise by allowing for the screening of large virtual libraries and the prediction of beneficial mutations, which dramatically accelerates and improves a protein redesign campaign.
