Dr Noam Prywes - University of Cambridge

Dr Noam Prywes

Rubisco enzymology at scale

By 2055 CO2 levels are likely to be 2 times the preindustrial average. This massive shift will affect the crop plants which we depend on for food. Plants assimilate ≈400 billion tons of CO2 annually through the Calvin cycle whose primary CO2 fixing enzyme, rubisco, is neither very fast nor specific to CO2. Yet prior efforts to optimize rubisco have failed, likely because traditional biochemical methods can only study small numbers of sequence variants. Here I present the first large-scale platform to generate and test thousands of rubisco mutants using an E. coli strain engineered to depend on rubisco carboxylation for growth. This method will provide the data necessary to train models which will predict enzyme function from sequence alone.