Super-Charge Your Enzyme: ML-based Optimization for Temperature Performance

Cost-effective ML-based solutions to help you optimize enzymes for temperature performance

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE

A Ginkgo partner recently reduced the amount of exogenous enzyme they needed to add to their manufacturing process by ten-fold, saving them millions of dollars in input costs by using Ginkgo’s enzyme discovery services.  

The challenge was that their whole-cell catalyst performance was dropping in their high-temperature process — requiring supplementation with expensive, exogenous enzymes to maintain yields.  Here is how they solved that challenge with speed and flexibility leveraging the power of Ginkgo’s tools.

PROTEIN SOURCING: Finding a Better Needle in Nature’s Haystack

With Ginkgo’s tools you don’t need to rely on the obvious—you can dive deeper into nature’s diversity to uncover solutions others miss. Our partner had hit a wall, focusing only on enzyme variants close to their starting point enzyme sequence. 

Using our computational tools, we sifted through billions of enzymes, narrowing the field to 942 diverse candidates for testing. The result? A broader search that led to the perfect enzyme that performed well at high temperature, reducing the need for exogenous supplementation by 10x.

OUTCOMES: Better Performance Through Design and Scale

After testing these candidates, we identified a novel enzyme with remarkable properties. The new enzyme was five times more active at elevated temperature than the starting point. Furthermore, the improved enzyme had only 35% sequence identity to the original enzyme.

With this novel enzyme, our partner reduced costs and increased flexibility in downstream applications. Here’s why this success matters:

• Reduced Manufacturing Costs: An improved enzyme led our customer to a 90% reduction in exogenous enzyme use and a 10% increase in product yield. This translated to substantial decreases in cost of goods for their product.

• Increase in Flexibility: Additionally, with a quarter of candidates being improved over the starting point in bench-scale testing, our customer gained flexibility in their final application. Multiple high-performing candidates  enabled them to scale with confidence that they’d have a solution even after testing for parameters that are difficult to assess at the bench scale.

• Compatibility with Industrial Processes: optimizing enzymes for thermostability (and other metrics like solvent or pH tolerance) enables use of biocatalysis in a wider range of demanding industrial processes.

Talk to us about ML-guided tools for protein engineering

At Ginkgo, we are committed to helping our partners unlock the full potential of enzymes for their industrial processes. Whether it’s finding a novel enzyme or optimizing existing ones, our expertise in scale, diversity, and advanced ML-guided protein engineering ensures you get the most out of your enzyme engineering efforts. Learn more about Ginkgo’s enzyme services here.

Posted by Ginkgo Bioworks