Project Reference: TRG27-BIO-NP1

Project title: Rubisco Enzymology at Scale

Project outline

By 2050 the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be close to two times what it was in 1850. This increase in CO2 will have a profound effect on algae and plants, including crops, which are responsible for turning CO2 into the carbon used by all of life on earth. There are now engineering opportunities to tune photosynthesis for this new reality and thereby improve crop yields.

One enzyme, rubisco, is the key carboxylase of the biosphere, responsible for virtually all of the conversion of carbon dioxide into biomass. Despite this, rubisco has remained recalcitrant to improvement, due to a lack of understanding of the chemical mechanism and in large part to the difficulty of purifying and characterizing rubisco enzymes.

In this project the student will develop techniques for the characterization of rubisco enzymes en masse. Building on previous work using a bespoke E. coli strain and high throughput sequencing, they will measure all of the Michaelis-Menten parameters of a library of enzymes simultaneously. This work will be supported by traditional biochemical methods. Machine learning will be used both to assign biochemical parameters from high throughput data, and to predict biochemical parameters from novel sequences. In the process they will develop new methods which will be useful in enzymology more broadly.

This project will use massive datasets to improve our understanding of the chemical mechanism of one of the most important reactions in nature. As a consequence of the structure of these datasets it will also be possible to perform enzyme engineering for application in crop plants with improved yields. Photosynthetic engineering remains an emerging field but the possibility of reshaping our relationship to the carbon cycle is a key goal in the upcoming century.

Principal Supervisor

Professor Noam Prywes

Email address: np648@cam.ac.uk

Department / Partner Institute: Biochemistry

Website: https://pryweslab.org/

BBSRC strategic theme

Understanding the rules of life