{"id":239637,"date":"2026-06-25T22:06:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T03:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/teaching-ai-to-invent-enzymes-nature-never-imagined"},"modified":"2026-06-25T22:06:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T03:06:43","slug":"teaching-ai-to-invent-enzymes-nature-never-imagined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/teaching-ai-to-invent-enzymes-nature-never-imagined","title":{"rendered":"Teaching AI to Invent Enzymes Nature Never Imagined"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/teaching-ai-to-invent-enzymes-nature-never-imagined.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Evolution is an extraordinary engine for enzymatic diversity, yet the chemistry it has explored remains a narrow slice of what DNA can encode. Deep generative models can design new proteins that bind ligands, but none have created enzymes without pre-specifying catalytic residues.<\/p>\n<p>In this webinar, Chenghao Liu and Jarrid Brooks from the Arnold Lab at Caltech will introduce DISCO (DIffusion for Sequence-structure CO-design). This multimodal model co-designs protein sequence and 3D structure around arbitrary biomolecules, as well as inference-time scaling methods that optimize objectives across both modalities. Conditioned solely on reactive intermediates, DISCO designs diverse heme enzymes with novel active-site geometries. These enzymes catalyze new-to-nature carbene-transfer reactions, including alkene cyclopropanation, spirocyclopropanation, B-H, and C(sp^3)-H insertions, with high activities exceeding those of engineered enzymes. Random mutagenesis of a selected design further confirmed that enzyme activity can be improved through directed evolution. By providing a scalable route to evolvable enzymes, DISCO broadens the potential scope of genetically encodable transformations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Evolution is an extraordinary engine for enzymatic diversity, yet the chemistry it has explored remains a narrow slice of what DNA can encode. Deep generative models can design new proteins that bind ligands, but none have created enzymes without pre-specifying catalytic residues. In this webinar, Chenghao Liu and Jarrid Brooks from the Arnold Lab at [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,412,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-genetics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}